Opinion
California can fix recovery housing by not treating it like treatment
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OPINION – California keeps circling the same debate about recovery housing without ever landing on a solution. For more than a decade, lawmakers have introduced bills aimed at sober living homes, recovery residences, and supportive recovery housing. Each effort starts from a reasonable goal: protect residents, safeguard communities, and ensure public dollars are spent responsibly. Yet despite years of legislation, studies, and pilot programs, confusion persists.
The reason is straightforward. California still lacks a clear, enforceable, statewide certification for recovery residences—one that is distinct from treatment and grounded in nationally recognized standards. Without that clarity, recovery housing exists in a policy gray zone. Providers operate under inconsistent rules, counties struggle to decide what they can fund, and residents are often left unsure of what they are actually receiving. The state doesn’t have a recovery housing problem because recovery housing doesn’t work. It has a problem because it refuses to define it correctly.
The good news is that California doesn’t need to invent a solution. It already exists. Across the country, states have increasingly turned to the National Alliance for Recovery Residences, or NARR, as the gold standard for recovery housing. NARR’s national quality standards focus on safety, ethics, resident rights, governance, and accountability, while preserving what makes recovery housing effective: peer support, community, and stability rather than clinical care.
To help states implement these standards, the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, working in partnership with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, developed the Model Recovery Residence Certification Act. The model legislation lays out a clear and practical framework. States establish a certification system, use NARR-based standards to define quality, assign oversight to an independent certifying body, draw firm boundaries between treatment and housing, and align public funding with providers that meet those standards. This framework has been adopted or adapted by multiple states, and it works.
One of California’s biggest challenges has been its ongoing failure to clearly separate treatment from recovery housing. While the two are connected, they are not the same. Treatment is clinical. It involves licensed services, therapy, and medical oversight. Recovery housing is not treatment. It is non-clinical, peer-driven housing designed to support people as they build and sustain recovery in their daily lives.
When the state blurs that distinction, the consequences are predictable. Residents are misled about the services they are receiving. Ethical housing operators are regulated as if they were treatment programs. Treatment providers operate housing without appropriate accountability. Counties and state agencies struggle to determine what they can legally fund. And bad actors exploit the confusion while responsible providers are pushed out.
Certification solves this by drawing a bright, enforceable line. Recovery residences provide housing and recovery support. Treatment providers deliver clinical services. If both exist, the relationship must be transparent and clearly defined.
Over the last ten years, California has attempted to address recovery housing through studies, pilot programs, contracting rules, and Housing First carve-outs. Bills such as AB 2214, AB 285, AB 1696, AB 2893, SB 1438, AB 2479, and most recently AB 255 all reflect a growing acknowledgment that recovery housing matters. But without certification, these efforts remain incomplete. Today, there is still no statewide standard for what qualifies as a recovery residence, no consistent consumer protections for residents, and no objective framework for funding decisions. That vacuum has fueled controversy rather than solutions.
A California Recovery Residence Certification, aligned with the Model Recovery Residence Certification Act and administered by California’s NARR affiliate, would change that. Certification would establish uniform statewide standards, create meaningful consumer protections, clearly distinguish recovery housing from treatment in law and practice, and give counties and the state objective criteria for deciding which homes deserve public support. It would elevate ethical providers, remove bad actors, reduce local zoning and enforcement conflicts, and rebuild public trust in recovery housing as a legitimate and essential part of the recovery continuum.
Most importantly, it would center the safety, dignity, and long-term success of people in recovery, rather than leaving them caught in ongoing policy disputes.
California has an opportunity to lead—not by creating another unique system, but by adopting a proven national model and tailoring it to the state’s needs. Recovery housing works when it is done right. Certification is how California can finally make sure that it is.
Pete Nielsen is the CEO of the California Consortium of Addiction Programs and Professionals (CCAPP).
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This article is right about one thing: California has spent years circling the issue of recovery housing without landing on clarity. Where we differ is what clarity should look like—and who should carry the cost of it.
From the perspective of CRUSH and Sober Clarity Housing, recovery housing is not failing because it lacks another statewide framework. It is struggling because policy conversations continue to be dominated by theory, compliance language, and national models—while the lived reality on the ground is underfunded, overregulated, and increasingly inaccessible to the very people recovery housing is meant to serve.
We agree that recovery housing is not treatment. It is peer-led, non-clinical, and rooted in accountability, community, and lived experience. That distinction matters. But certification alone does not solve the deeper structural problem: California continues to treat recovery housing as an afterthought in the continuum of care, while expecting it to shoulder the consequences of homelessness, incarceration, untreated trauma, and system failures—often without sustainable funding.
For grassroots and community-based providers, especially those led by people with lived experience, the push toward formalized certification risks becoming another barrier rather than a safeguard. Certification systems—no matter how well-intended—can easily replicate the same inequities we already see in treatment and housing contracts: large operators with legal teams and administrative staff thrive, while smaller, frontline programs are squeezed out despite doing the most direct, effective work.
What’s missing from this debate is honesty about funding and power.
Counties routinely acknowledge the value of recovery housing, yet fail to fund it adequately—or at all—unless it is attached to treatment, wrapped in layers of bureaucracy, or filtered through intermediaries. Meanwhile, recovery homes are expected to absorb risk, maintain safety, enforce accountability, and stabilize lives on razor-thin margins. That is not a policy gap; it is a values gap.
Consumer protections matter. Accountability matters. Bad actors should be removed. We do not dispute that. But protection cannot come at the cost of excluding ethical, community-rooted providers who lack the resources to navigate yet another system designed without them at the table.
If California is serious about recovery housing, it must do more than certify it. The state must:
Fund recovery housing directly, not only through treatment or Housing First carve-outs.
Protect small and peer-led providers, not just institutional operators.
Include people with lived experience in designing standards, not merely complying with them.
Recognize recovery housing as essential infrastructure, not a pilot, experiment, or policy footnote.
Recovery housing works because it is relational, accountable, and grounded in community—not because it mirrors clinical or governmental systems. Any statewide approach must preserve that truth, not regulate it out of existence.
Clarity is needed. But clarity without equity, funding, and humility will only deepen the divide between policy intent and lived reality. California does not need another abstract solution. It needs to listen to the people with lived experience- the people on the frontline doing the work—and the people living in recovery housing every day.
That is where real reform begins.
Sober living in bay area is very expensive. Transportation is not easy. It’s interesting that this article doesn’t say anything about what the national standards are.