No-strings-attached housing gives stability to recovering addicts

Newsrooms across the commonwealth have spent years documenting the opioid crisis in their own communities. But now, in the special project State of Emergency: Searching for Solutions to Pennsylvania’s Opioids Crisis, we are marshalling resources to spotlight what Pennsylvanians are doing to try to reverse the soaring number of overdose deaths.

WITF is releasing more than 60 stories, videos and photos throughout July. This week, you will find stories about treatment facilities and recovery.

(Philadelphia) – Last August, when an outreach worker told her an apartment was ready for her, Justine O’Driscoll figured it was too good to be true.

The Philadelphia woman had been homeless and addicted to heroin for five years. But with government programs insisting on sobriety before getting housing, it was hard to see a way out.

This time, there were no strings attached. Two months after moving into her one-bedroom apartment, O’Driscoll was in treatment.  She is eight months sober now.

She did it with the help of Pathways to Housing, a program for people with opioid addiction like none other in the U.S.  A year after it began, 54 percent of its 75 participants are in treatment or abstaining from drug use.

Recovery requires stability, said Matt Tice, the program’s clinical director. That can’t be found on the streets.

“We are trying to get people to tomorrow,” he said. “You have no opportunity to recover if you’re dead.”

Pathways is now at the heart of the city’s plan to clear two of four heroin encampments helping turn the Kensington area into a magnet for addiction. The program is expanding to accommodate the camps’ residents.

Each week, Tice and his team of outreach workers meet to discuss their clients’ progress. They assign social workers, doctors and peer specialists — people who have been in addiction themselves — to help participants transition back into society.

Even with the support that Pathways provides, success is still precarious. Seven participants have died in the last year, all of them after a period of abstinence in jail, in the hospital or in detox. Getting off drugs, then resuming use at prior doses, frequently leads to fatal overdoses because the person’s tolerance has been so reduced in detox.

Program staffers work diligently to keep clients from falling through the cracks. Joe Quinn, one of the program’s peer specialists, was addicted to opioids for 19 years before entering recovery six years ago. He takes clients to the movies, to baseball games — anything to build trust.

“By sharing our experience, we help them problem-solve,” he said.

O’Driscoll remembers the outreach workers who checked on her in the early days of her recovery– “to make sure I wasn’t dead,” she said — and those who took her grocery shopping, or for a trip to get cosmetics at Sephora.

That support — and having a place of her own — made O’Driscoll, who is transgender, feel safe enough to take the first steps of her new life. “My apartment was a safe place to transition — to a different gender, but also to a different life.”

One morning in May, outreach worker Audrey Lundy pulled up to Emmett Paige’s apartment on Germantown Avenue. Paige, 61, entered the program after years of homelessness and addiction.

He showed Lundy a loose baseboard he was hoping his landlord could fix. He’d pinned a collage of photos of Rocky Balboa to his wall and set a row of houseplants on his windowsill. The apartment was spotless. He tidied up anyway.

“My whole life has just changed over,” he said. “I’m getting my friends back, my loved ones back — everything is coming back to life.”