Monday, March 30, 2015

Her Boyfriend's Hungry

I received a snarky email a few days ago from a halfway house resident's girlfriend.

She complains that our Roosevelt house has none of the amenities mentioned on our website.

She says there's no art therapy or yoga. That the food is inadequate because her boyfriend is always hungry. And that the building is "ghetto."

She also wonders just what they are "getting for $110 a week."

I suggested that she had our treatment program and the halfway house mixed up. That she should check our site again.

I didn't go much further with my response though. Because I realized she must be young and not have much experience in life.

After all, I'm not sure what economy she lives in. Because I don't know of anyplace that will house and feed a person for $110 a week. And we offer more than that in the form of job help, peer counseling, and recovery support.

Now I'm the first to admit our property's not the best. We have a dozen full-time maintenance and construction people who work to keep our buildings in good shape. And they do well.

But our place is not the Meadows, Betty Ford Clinic, or Recovery in Malibu. And we don't represent it as such. In fact, as this resident's girlfriend said, it's in the middle of one of the larger ghettos in Phoenix.

However, we do tell our clients and residents that if they do what we say they'll stay clean and sober.

And that's the same thing the fancy, expensive places tell their clients – only they charge $40,000 to $90,000 a month for their help.