SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- How do you go from living off investment income in a million-dollar house in Natomas to sleeping in an unheated shed in somebody’s backyard?
All you have to do, says 51-year-old Scott, who just moved into a new county-funded sober living house in Sacramento, is stay drunk all day every day for 10 years, and “do a hell of a lot of meth.”
What percentage of those living on the street wound up there because of an addiction is a question that advocates and researchers fiercely and endlessly debate. Some point to studies that suggest almost all homelessness is caused by a lack of affordable housing. Others just as passionately cite evidence to the contrary, including the two-thirds of homeless people who answered one survey by listing substance abuse as a major factor.
From listening to homeless people themselves, I do not think that more affordable housing would on its own solve homelessness, though being unhoused obviously causes addiction, too. But which comes first is just not as interesting to me — yes, we need a lot more affordable housing, and yes, we need a lot more access to treatment, particularly in long-term residential programs — as what it takes someone who is in that situation to claw his or her way back.
All kinds of people wind up where they never thought they’d be. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that three of the first residents at the new HOPE Cooperative house in North Sacramento all happen to have been well off in the past, emotionally as well as materially. They had lots of stuff, which they miss, and people they didn’t ask for help because pride was the last luxury to go.
“Let’s be honest,” says Scott. He doesn’t want his last name in the paper because he’s afraid of jeopardizing his minimum-wage job at a Home Depot, where he’s been working for six months and just got a promotion. “You don’t want to say, ‘Hey kids, your dad’s in trouble.’ ‘Hey dad, your son f—ed up again.’”
David Lee Marks, who is 66 and had a booming Sacramento tree-trimming business he’s eager to revive, talks as wistfully about his white couches, Chinese screens and cherry furniture as about the also addicted girlfriend he misses but can’t see, he says, while trying to find his way back to the man he used to be.
“I had it all,” he tells me more than once. “I made bank, and I’ve fallen a long way. I’m sickened by it.” Sickened, he says, by the seven-bedroom house, 57 chainsaws, 3 trucks and 12 employees he lost while trying to get off alcohol and Xanax while trying to get off methadone while trying to get off heroin.
He also lost his brother, who used to work with him: “He drank himself to death 10 months ago, and nobody told me.” David has been clean for two weeks now, he says, and had been living in his truck, which scared him in a bunch of ways, for the month just before moving in here.
Nathan Darrow, who is 41, wasn’t wealthy, but wasn’t poor, either. He came here from his mom’s house, where he’d gone after being discharged from the hospital where he almost died of alcoholism in October. When he was in college, he says, everyone he knew drank pretty heavily, and then when he taught English in Japan, that continued to be the case. Once back in Sacramento, he landed a job with the state but lost it after repeatedly being so “piss drunk at work” that even the union said his firing was justified.
He lost his marriage, was dismissed from a coding boot camp and finally wound up renting a room where he worked a remote customer service job that “allowed me all kinds of opportunities” for pouring a shot or three of vodka whenever anyone annoyed him. Even after calling in sick on the day he was finally hospitalized, he said, he kept right on drinking until he had to go to the ER.
When “I broke down and called my mom” from the hospital, where he was treated for fatty liver disease, his whole family was “just relieved I called. My mom was happy” that he had survived to make the call.
‘A guy like me, we make it or die trying’
Scott is a veteran of both the U.S. Army and the prison system in Colorado, where he lost a big IT job and served three years for stealing computers from his office while under the influence of meth.
After his independently wealthy girlfriend in Natomas had the locks changed and canceled his credit cards and phone service in June of 2021, he lived in a tent, in a “nasty” Salvation Army shelter and finally in that freezing cold shed, which he had to leave by the end of January because the owner was selling the property.
Up until his DUI last May, Scott had still been “using meth and alcohol every single day.” Since then, he has been monitored by drug court and has stayed sober to avoid going to jail. But emotionally, he says, his recovery really just started when he moved into this house, which is nothing fancy but nothing frightening, either.
For him, it’s harder to stay away from alcohol than from meth: “I’ve heard meth is one of the hardest drugs to kick, but I haven’t given it a second thought.” Immediately, he corrects himself. “That’s not true, but the thought was fleeting. I’ve got more important things to do than think about a 20-minute high.”
Again, he polices his own truthfulness: “Not true, it lasts longer than that, and then come the after-effects, seeing people that aren’t there, seeing people come out of walls, and you don’t trust anybody.” When I say that does not sound like a lot of fun, he corrects that, too: “It’s quite fun for a few hours, but then you pay the price.”
Each of these men got here in ways that, though not exactly original, are different for everyone. But the way back is pretty well documented, and I hope to follow those living here during the six months to a year that they’ll be in the house, which HOPE already owned.
The long-term residential treatment that we know works best — just as you don’t bottom out in a minute, neither do you recover overnight — is so expensive it’s almost non-existent. So the model that this place and others are attempting pairs the crucial support of a sober living environment with intensive off-site outpatient treatment followed by less intensive care while still in the residential setting.
(The 30 days that even the best insurance typically covers for inpatient drug and alcohol treatment is not based on any finding that there’s anything medically magical about a month, which is why people who are discharged and go right back where they had been living and using so often relapse.)
The 20 men and women who will be living here, in separate townhouses, have to follow the rules, either work or show they’re looking for work and submit to regular drug and alcohol testing.
All three men I met last week said they feel more hopeful now than they have in a long time.
Scott said his goal is “to put myself together the way I used to be — respectable, dependable, stable.” Nathan, who wants to bond with others sharing the same struggles, says, “It’s only been a couple of days, but there are a lot of funny guys here, and people are always saying hi to me,” making him feel that “there are people in your corner.”
David is grateful for “somewhere to hang your hat for a minute. A guy like me, we make it or die trying. My logo,” he says, and shows me the last business card he has, and has hung onto, “is, ‘If we can’t do it, it can’t be done.’”
A lot depends on how they do, not only for them and those who love them, but for how we fund treatment and figure out what works. Everyone in this program knows that to “die trying” is not just a figure of speech.
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