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What is a Halfway House vs. a Sober Living?

Sober Living Halfway House Search has been developed so that people who need after-care recovery housing can find it anywhere in this country. Therefore, it is very important that everybody (including sober living owners and halfway house owners) understand the few differences between these two houses and understand why so many people are confused and/or misinformed.

When I gave a presentation on the West Coast for sober living managers, afterwards one told me I was going to have a problem marketing this site. When a house owner inferred the reason was he was prejudiced about the site having the words "halfway house" in the title, I knew it was high time to address this issue of “What is a Halfway House vs. What is a sober living house” once and for all. As I am the only person who has developed a site with such an extensive number of both kinds of houses listed, I think we can consider me an authority on the subject. So let’s make this article the last word on the matter – for everyone’s good. This is very important!

People learn the hard way that the SMART thing to do after treatment for drugs and alcohol is to decompress in an alcohol free, drug free, sober living environment or halfway house that is comfortable and supportive and where you have to stay sober. "Recovery Housing" is an umbrella phrase that covers all types of sober housing that regular people like me needed when I was newly sober and had not yet lived outside of a highly structured treatment center environment where I spent 57 days. The treatment center gave me a big, brass medallion and made me feel as though I had graduated their program and was ready to face the world. I just wanted out of that place so I jumped in my car and couldn't wait to get back to my friends and the "good" part of my old life.

Were it not for God intervening during that one hour drive from Pasadena California back out to the beach in my case, I am positive I'd be dead today and never could have created this site. You see I started to get really excited about going home, but I realized I was a little TOO excited. In fact the more God helped me see, I quickly came to realize there was no "good part" of my life to come back to. My life at home had involved a lot of sneaking around drinking and taking pills and deep inside the disease of addiction was alive and well and with a little help I suddenly realized this was crazy to go home and be on my own again. Ids THAT what I was excited to get back to? would not be sitting here right now, nor could I yet have tested out my "sober toolbox" (all the things I learned in treatment) in the real world. A lot of people ask "what is a halfway house, anyhow?" On the east coast and parts of the mid-west they are generally called halfway houses, and in the southwest and west they are called sober livings - but by and large these two types of recovery housing are EXACTLY the same thing.

It's too bad some owners of these sober houses exhibit the very same ignorance towards their brother or sister houses on the opposite side of the country who do the exact same thing (to help people stay sober), that neighbors exhibit when either type of these houses simply want to set up quietly in a decent neighborhood.

Q: Which one of these houses is the sober living, and which one is the halfway house?
A: It would simply depend on which house was on the east coast, and which was on the west coast.

Halfway Houses and sober livings both have homes suited for men, for women, for mothers with children, fathers with children and for coed houses. Where people get confused - even the half way house and sober living owners I have spoken with extensively - is that the Department of Corrections (DOC) operates what is called a "Halfway House Program" which is designed to help inmates adjust to a non-prison or residential environments and many of these houses are disasters in terms of criminal activity and escapees.

The problem is the newspapers write stories about this guy attacking that guy and escaping his Half way House, and the general public comes to believe that ALL halfway houses (and sober livings for that matter) house dangerous individuals. I personally cannot for the life of me understand how a Halfway HOME that operates like a sober living and takes in recovering addicts and alcoholics who are generally harmless can call themselves the same name as what the DOC operates, but they do. It is confusing and it totally freaks out a neighborhood when a sober living or regular halfway house moves in - because the neighbors associate these relatively quiet houses with corruption, ex-murderers, thieves and the like - and they do all they can to prevent such houses from opening in a residentially zoned neighborhood.

The neighborhood folks, of course, elect the city officials and city councils, so the "elected ones" feel a need to react with the peoples' better interests (or so they think) in mind and fight the recovery homes. The fact is there are really TWO types of homes trying to forge ahead out there. One type consists of sober livings and halfway houses that are alcohol free, drug free, supportive, generally quiet, harmless houses that are meant to help people who have already gone through the difficult part of alcohol and drug recovery which is initial treatment that usually lasts 30, 60, or 90 days.

The fact of the matter is if someone goes home directly after treatment with no transitional housing, called sober living, halfway housing, recovery housing or even a ¾ house - there is said to be about a 90% chance that the individual will relapse back on drugs and alcohol within one year, and usually it does not take that long before they are right back in treatment. It is one of the reasons alcoholics and addicts get such a bad rap - they relapse a lot on the way to permanent sobriety. After doing the same thing a few times, the strong or wiser people who can make the smarter decision to change their routine and participate in AFTER-CARE HOUSING AND AFTER-CARE OUTPATIENT TREATMENT GIVE THEMSELVES AN INFINITELY HIGHER CHANCE OF STAYING SOBER.

The chief difference then between a halfway house and a soberliving is simply geography. Oh - and I should mention each has a bias against one another, also. I have heard people on the west coast say they don't want to participate in this site because it is called "SOBER LIVING HALFWAY HOUSE SEARCH" and has the word "halfway house" in the site's name. And I have heard halfway houses say they don't want to participate in the site because they do not want to associate with sober livings - which they believe are cushy, lawless houses full of people who don't work a program or have to go to meetings or follow any rules.

In the meantime, due to the ridiculous egos of all parties involved, do you know who gets hurt by those houses who have a petty attitude about their brother or sister houses on the opposite coast? The person who wants to find a house gets hurt, because that house doesn't want to mix with the other breed on the most visited site in the recovery housing arena - right here. We get over 20,000 house searches every month! Well I am here to tell you owners and managers we are all in the same business of helping people who are in need! By putting aside your stigmas and listing you will make it easier for the goal of this site to be realized - which is to list all the good houses in the country for the people who need you, including counselors and the parents who often pay but wish to see what they are paying for and need to find you, so that loved ones can continue to work on their sobriety and work their programs and simply continue to get better.

We need a little more harmony between both types of houses, and the neighbors would follow. If we left the Department of Corrections (where the REAL problems do exist) to fend for themselves, somehow I think it would all work out just fine between the rest of us. Let's give it a try and help each other on this front, and eliminate the ignorance about discrimination between two types of houses and the neighbors in the middle. Let's give the men, women, women with children, fathers with children and everybody else a chance to have a better life. If they want it, they deserve to have it. And you can help if you own, operate, or manage a recovery house. Join the site and don't say no because of a stigma you feel the name of the site carries when in fact it doesn't carry one at all in any of the people's eyes who need such houses. And if you are looking for a house, go to the second menu tab that says "Search for Houses Here" and pick out a great house.

I hope this article clears up the question "what is a halfway house vs. a sober living" because the answer is simple and explained by the cartoon pictures above: there is no difference between these houses - except for DOC Halfway Homes which fall into a totally separate category of their own.

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The Idea and Approach Behind Sober Living Halfway House Search

Having to go through treatment eventually led me to this project, and as difficult as the journey has been, there is not one single thing I'd change, given the opportunity to do so.

We believe that as things stand right now, finding a sober living or halfway house that’s right for you is a complicated process. It involves shuffling through a lot of different websites that are generally in a state of disarray all over the web, despite the best efforts of some. Those listings are  presented in a variety of ways, where you have to go to many different pages to find specific information like price, different amenities, what the rooms look like, and what the house operating philosophy is. And if you want to see a selection of sober livings in a general area, good luck — because they tend to be spread out all over Google or whatever search engine you are using — unless it is ours. Our goal in developing Sober Living Halfway House Search has always been to remove those barriers and make it easy to find a house and make a decision from a selection you like.

Our site is set up as an organized database of houses that are reached by way of a fairly simple geographic search engine. It asks you where you want to look for a house in terms of the nearest town or city, how far you want the search to extend from that place, and then you can put in a number of parameters that we think are pretty neat because they are custom-tailored to would-be sober living guests.  The search engine pulls up all the houses that fit the parameters of the search and shows them to you on summary pages with 7 houses to a page — not an overwhelming number.

From any summary page you can ask to see the details of any of the houses. Our House Details page then comes up, arranged in the same general format for each house. This way, a large number of factors and amenities ranging from pictures of the property to qualifications of management, can be compared to decide which house suits you best. It was very important in our design that we fit everything anybody should need to make his or her decision about a house into one , flowing visual space. This would alleviate the need to go to one page for price, another page for philosophy, and so on. It’s a time-saver which you will appreciate if you go compare a few houses.

So great — all the houses are put together in a manner we think is pretty streamlined — but how do you get to our site in the first place? In order to be most effective, we would like to be in front of the guest while their checkbooks are open because they need a house. We believe the most logical and probable place they will go to search for a house today is Google, so that’s where we want to be. When people want something they go to Google and that’s why Google is a mega-billion dollar company. Google makes most of their money from businesses that can’t get on that all-important front page where over 75% of searchers find what they need and make their purchases — so businesses use “pay-per-click” advertising to get there “artificially”. But this is where we feel the Sober Living Halfway House Search strategy should give houses that join our site the best visibility possible. To quickly demonstrate this, let’s emulate  a prospective guest:

Open another tab or browser and type in “Search for sober livings” on Google and see what results. Sober Living Halfway House Search comes up first with a description that indicates we have most of the houses in the US listed with us. This is a phrase we are successfully optimized for, and we are working every day to optimize for all the searches we know people use. That’s how a guest lands on our site, and if you were listed with us and had input all your information to make your details page look great, that guest could soon be your resident. We are fast approaching all the top spots in Google where people go and for what they input when looking for sober livings or halfway houses. We believe once we get to the top we will stay there. We believe there is the best position to be because we want to totally dominate where we feel guests who are ready to move actually go - and that is Google. We could advertise with pay per click to get to the top but we have spent the time and money to get to the top of Google organically.

We envision being able to help organize and display a large part of the sober living and private halfway housing markets across the country in the months and years ahead. This will make it easier for  people in need to find the perfect house  — by way of a visual and written “ONE PAGE SHOWS ALL” experience. If that house has its own site, the page is connected to that and a big, blue hyperlink invites the user to see that home’s private website. This way users can look even deeper into a prospective home, giving those sites a potentially huge boost in traffic by way more visits from our site–without ever losing any brand or identity.

Our core belief is that nowhere near the amount of people who need sober livings or halfway houses are taking advantage of them, or even seriously considering them a viable after-treatment option, and that clearly needs to change. The reason we think so many people skip sober living is essentially fear-based. And the manner in which most people have to find a house today is a process that engenders fear, especially in early recovery when social disorders addicts have are heightened.

Treatment centers give out lists to patients who are already anxious about checking out. They are then expected to call up a stranger, make an appointment to go see a property they really don’t want to be stuck at — and this gives a fragile person far too many “outs” where it is so much easier to just say “forget it”. But if in a moment of inspiration he or she could pick up a computer, see pictures and descriptions of a house they think is pretty cool, we could find them saying “hey, I didn’t know they had sober livings like that and yeah — I could see myself living there”.

That’s the whole idea behind our site. We believe we offer a terrific showcase that can give someone an actual feeling about a house that enables them to be comfortable enough to make that all-important call and take the right steps. We designed the site using our specific approach with the hope and idea that we may be able to help get a few more people who need sober living to experience it — and stop their chronic cycles of relapse once and for all.

Pricing: To cap off a well-designed site, we feel our pricing can't be beat. Right now we are offering an initial 6 month trial for just $97. If you are not thrilled with your referrals you may have another 6 months free. We also offer "Featured Listings" where you can show up in one of the top 3 spots every search for 6 months for $189, or for 1 year for just $300. We look forward to hopefully adding you as valued client to our growing list of members, and to adding you to the list of houses taking advantage of a the STARR Sober Living Network, a national network for sober livings and halfway houses. STARR SOBER LIVING NETWORK PLEDGE

Press Release as of 12/18/2010

Link to this content and use it as a good sober living story on your website - just give credit with a link please