Bangor sober living organization to open 14th location
A Bangor organization that provides safe, affordable housing for people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction will add a new residence in Bangor to expand its capacity.
Fresh Start Sober Living will open its 14th sober living home at 416 Hammond St. in Bangor, in partnership with the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter, in the coming weeks, said Scott Pardy, Fresh Start’s founder.
The new location adds 11 beds, bringing the organization’s housing capacity to 112 people across its 14 locations in Bangor and Brewer, Pardy said. Two of the homes are for women and the rest are men’s housing.
While the organization usually has a couple beds free at any given time, Pardy said he’s constantly receiving new housing applications. He doesn’t know if and when he’ll ever meet the demand for recovery housing as Maine’s opioid crisis rages, leading Maine to see continuously higher numbers of overdoses.
“When I opened the first house, I thought I’d be lucky to fill it,” he said. “Now, I don’t know where the saturation point is anymore.”
The organization has received 624 housing applications since installing the technology that allows people to submit online applications 10 months ago. Some 97 of the organization’s 101 beds were full as of Wednesday.
Pardy doesn’t keep a waitlist, however, because the window in which people are ready to detox and remain sober often doesn’t stay open for long, he said. This means if a room opens for someone who was seeking recovery a month ago, they may not be ready to enter the home anymore.
The Bangor Area Homeless Shelter purchased the new home last week using two $100,000 and $20,000 grants from Maine State Housing Authority and Penobscot County Commissioners, respectively, Boyd Kronholm, Bangor Area Homeless Shelter director said. The shelter will lease the home to Fresh Start.
“This is a perfect collaboration between the shelter and Fresh Start,” Pardy said. “The shelter is the next step up from being homeless and Fresh Start is the next step toward living independently.”
The property, which used to be a residential home before being converted into a Century 21 office building, will hold 11 single rooms with a communal kitchen and living area. Pardy hopes to have people moving in within four or five weeks, he said.
The new home will prioritize people who are currently or at risk of experiencing homelessness, Kronholm said.
“We’ve been making referrals to Fresh Start often, and people are fairly successful once beds become available,” Kronholm said. “In the past year, we’ve probably had a dozen or more people enter a Fresh Start home from the shelter.”
Pardy said he has seen more people seeking recovery recently as stigma ebbs around substance use disorder. They understand the illicit drugs on the streets are often laced with fentanyl, a dangerous drug that can be fatal in small amounts.
“People are recognizing that there’s no heroin anymore. It’s all fentanyl, and they can’t keep doing it,” Pardy said. “Fentanyl is in everything now, and it’s a dangerous thing. I think people recognize that now and are seeking help, which wasn’t necessarily the case five years ago.”
Pardy, who is in long-term recovery himself, founded Fresh Start Sober Living in 2018 after volunteering at the Penobscot County Jail, where he watched the same handful of people strive to maintain their sobriety. Once they were released from jail, however, they often didn’t have a safe place to live or the support to maintain their sobriety. This led people to wind up back in jail again, and the cycle would continue.
Each of Fresh Start’s homes has a list of strict rules it requires all residents to follow, including not consuming or possessing any alcohol or drugs, with the exception of marijuana.
While some people only stay in a Fresh Start home for a few hours or days, Pardy said he doesn’t set any time limit on residents, and several people have remained since he opened the first home five years ago.
“We’ve had people come in, but be gone that evening. Some people last days with us and some last years,” he said. “We don’t kick people out and we want them to stay so they can have a good life.”