New Haven Independent

Organizers of a new Oxford House have been gradually moving men into a rented one-family building on Roydon Road. They invited neighbors to a meeting to discuss their fears. That meeting failed to calm the block, especially when neighbors learned of the plans to move in 12 people. Bernie, who’s in charge of the house, an outpost of the celebrated nationwide not-for-profit organization, said he’s organizing a second neighborhood meeting for this coming Tuesday night. (He didn’t give his last name.)

Oxford Houses are occupied and run by recovering substance abusers who have graduated from treatment programs, have jobs and are moving toward reentering society. Addicts who relapse are evicted. The new Roydon Road home is one of 1,233 Oxford Houses across the country.

Roydon is a racially mixed, middle-class street of well-kept houses, clean sidewalks and trim lawns off Goffe Terrace. As older empty nesters moved to assisted living institutions or died off, they sold to a wave of young families with small children, renewing the energy and stability of a street within walkie-talkie distance of more marginal blocks.

In living-room conversations Friday morning, neighbors struggled to balance their support for recovering addicts with their concern over the fate of the safe, peaceful family neighborhood they bought into.

Emma’s family lives next door to the new Oxford House. They moved here from Atlanta last September so Emma’s dad could take a job in Stamford. New Haven was the closest affordable community.

“We like it a lot. It is a very nice neighborhood. People are very professional and super nice,” said Emma’s mom, Shannon John, as “Finding Nemo” played on the Sony TV in the living room. “I don’t like it [the new Oxford House]. We just bought this house. I’m concerned if we try to sell it, people will be scared off.”

On the other hand, she continued, “There are several Oxford Houses in New Haven. Their web site seems to be pretty formidable. They’re doing a good thing. They’ve kept to themselves so far. I think this is going to be a harmonious thing.”

Across the street, Pamela Ernstberger said incessant daytime horn-honking outside the Oxford House has already disturbed one of her daughters who was trying to sleep off a sickness.

“It’s an effort to buy a house and find a nice place. We pay our mortgage. As a neighborhood we want to support them and their program,” said Ernstberger (pictured). “But everybody would have preferred another family with children to move in. I’m just being honest. They kept saying they’re a family like every other family. But they’re not.”

Ernsteberger, a Scotland-born marine biologist, had the TV news on. She and her husband, who’s from Germany, moved to the U.S., and New Haven, last summer with their two daughters, who are now 4 and 6. “We’re still trying to get used to the news in the U.S.,” she said. She’s also getting used to this neighborhood-based addiction-recovery concept. You don’t find that in Europe, she said.

Next door, Charlie Dellinger-Pate said the new Oxford House has already changed the neighborhood. She and her husband have lived on the block eight years. They have a 6 year-old daughter.

She, too, brought up the horn-honking. “I had someone blowing the horn for 15 minutes yesterday.”

Really? A whole 15 minutes?

“OK, I exaggerated,” said Dellinger-Pate, who teaches at Southern Connecticut State University. “It was ten minutes.” And it has happened several times, she said. “That’s the inner-city mentality, to keep blowing the horn. We’re trying to make it more like a family neighborhood than a transient, come-and-go inner-city kind of place.

“We’re trying to make it more like a family neighborhood. We don’t have the grad students from Yale. So we don’t have to turnover. We’re trying to grow roots and be productive members of New Haven.

“I can understand and appreciate the issue that Oxford House has. But they’re the only house that’s rented on this street. They’re going to have more people in that house than in seven other houses.”

Limited Recourse

The neighbors said they may want to try to take some kind of action against Oxford House, especially if plans proceed to move 12 people into the house.

But their options appear limited. Even though local zoning laws would normally forbid more than four unrelated people to live in a one-family house on Roydon Road.

Bernie, who had the Colortyme TV tuned to the Sci-Fi Channel in the Oxford House living room, said he couldn’t comment for this article. But the national CEO of Oxford House, Paul Molloy, pointed out that the federal Fair Housing Act overrides local zoning laws. The act forbids discrimination against people based on race, creed or disability. Drug and alcohol addiction are considered a disability. Oxford Houses have won many court challenges against local zoners on that basis.

Alderman Carl Goldfield (pictured) happens to live on the same block as the new Oxford House on Roydon. He said he and other skeptical neighbors have adopted a “wait-and-see attitude.”

“We’re not going to be a bunch of peasants with flaming torches,” Goldfield said. “We’re a liberal group who understand that people with drug and alcohol problems need a place to go.” An attorney, Goldfield is aware of the Fair Housing override of local zoning. He still wants to know if the neighbors have other legal options to prevent what usually constitutes an illegal rooming house from operating on the block.

City code enforcer Rafael Ramos said he’s checking into that. He wants to know if, for instance, public health laws are exempt from the Fair Housing disability override.

They’re not, Paul Molloy said. He said Oxford House prevailed in a 2001 federal court case when West Haven tried to keep out an Oxford House on that basis.

Molloy’s message to Roydon Road neighbors: “In every one of these cases Oxford House prevails. But the better news is there is never a problem. We’ve been around for 30 years. Alcoholics and drug addicts have lived in these houses and followed this Oxford House system of operation, which is based on the New England town meeting. And people are getting clean and sober.”

From the Gutter to “60 Minutes”

Molloy works out of Oxford House’s Silver Spring, Maryland, headquarters. In a phone conversation Friday, he described how he came to found the organization in 1975.

“I was a recovering drunk and had been a yuppie in my town, Republican counsel for the Senate Commerce Committee. I’m a happy-ending story. My wife and I were divorced for 13 years and remarried 18 years ago.”

But first he hit bottom, he said. “I was an alcoholic. Among other things my wife got sick of me trying to kill her when I was drunk. She called the cops and got me committed to a psych ward.

“I then ended up on the streets of D.C. To make a long story short, I went through a bunch of lawyers because of my irrationality. Finally this one lawyer I had fired early on saw me on the street and said, ‘I’m not gonna help you unless you go three days without a drink.’ He got me into something called a quarter-way house, which was a 21-day program. Then I got into a halfway house. The first three months, 12 guys had to leave because their six months were up. There was a time limit of six months.

“It was quick for those of us who were there to learn that 11 of those 12 relapsed within 30 days.

“The county said, ‘We’re gonna close this [facility].’ Several of us went to the AA meeting that night and went to a restaurant. We were saying, ‘Here we are we trying to get sober. And the government is against us.’

“The old-timers in AA who listened to us for three or four minutes said, ‘Get off the pity pot and run the house yourselves.’

“We said, ‘We can’t.’ Because in 1975 the county was spending $145,000 a year to run the house. They had a full-time house manager, Frank. A full-time cook, who was Hank. And a full-time counselor, who was Charlie. And they provided meals.

“They said, ‘You don’t need a house manager. You’re all grown up. Cook your own food. If you need a counselor, go up to Montville.’”

That sounded good to them, until they learned the next day that the county rented the building for $700 a month.

At the AA meeting that evening, “we had long faces. We said, ‘None of us have $700.’ A guy in AA wrote us a check and said, ‘Pay me back when you can.’” (They did, five years later.)

“In that first case there was no complaint from the neighborhood. Within a couple of months we had people apply. We had no room at the inn. We threw out a couple of people who had relapsed. The original 13 guys had saved us $1,200 after two months. We then rented a second house. Those two houses rented a third house.”

A model was born, one that, with the help of a subsequent federal loan program, would enable recovering addicts to start and run Oxford Houses across the country.

The program’s success earned praise and support from Congress and “60 Minutes.” (Click here and scroll to the bottom left of the screen to load that episode.) But success brought with it battle after battle with concerned neighbors, beginning with that third Oxford House.

That third house was near Chevy Chase Circle, in a “fancy rich area of Washington D.C. We had 13 men moving in this house. This was 1976. The neighborhood association said, ‘Hey, we don’t want this in our neighborhood.’ They raised hell about it. At that time there were no group homes west of Rock Creek Park. West of Rock Creek Park was the white area of town.

“We said to the neighborhood association, ‘Look, we’re just renting the house. Give us a chance. If you don’t like us after a year, we’ll leave. Otherwise we’ll go to the City Council and they’ll probably change the law, and you’ll end up with a bunch of murderers and sex offenders.’

“We never heard complaints from that association again. On the tenth anniversary in 1986, 100 people came to the party. That house is still in that fancy neighborhood. The neighbors are proud of it. Over the years, there have been 300 people who got clean and sober in that one house.”

Will a similar party take place on Roydon Road in 2016?

Emma will be 12 then. Her mom Shannon John hopes her new neighbors succeed in staying clean and sober. She also hopes the neighborhood her young family just moved in to stays calm and a great place to raise kids. She keeps telling herself it will work out. She wants it to.

“If there is a problem,” John said, “you can bet this neighborhood will address it immediately. We look out for each other. There are several attorneys on the block. And the alderman lives down the street.”

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