West Valley cities enforce tighter regulations to tackle unlicensed sober living homes

When a Glendale code enforcement officer knocked on the door of a seven-bedroom home in a neighborhood along North 54th Drive on Feb. 7, it was the city’s fourth inspection there in 11 months. It followed multiple check-ins made over the phone.

It's part of a growing effort across the West Valley to track mostly unregulated sober living homes that house people seeking shelter and rehabilitation of drug and alcohol additions. The effort is also aimed at cracking down on those homes that ripped off these vulnerable people and disrupted neighborhoods.

Weeks before, the Glendale officer had dropped off a final notice to cease operations as a sober living home. It came after the company managing the group home didn’t meet the city’s new licensing requirements.

For about the last year, the company made attempts to secure a Glendale business license, applying for what’s called a “reservation” to see if the site is suitable for a halfway home.

As part of the process, the company had to jump through multiple hurdles, such as seeing if it met the city’s minimum distance requirements from other group homes and then obtaining a Certificate of Occupancy within 60 days of getting its reservation approved.

When it didn’t get that certificate, it triggered more follow-up calls from code enforcement. Eventually, the company gave up, after learning it would need to install a fire sprinkler system that it couldn’t afford.

The latest inspection was to ensure the company’s three remaining occupants had moved out of the home — down from the 11 people reported there the day of the first March 7 visit, according to code compliance reports The Arizona Republic obtained through a public records request.

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When a woman opened the door, she let the officer in to inspect and told them the home was now a rental. She and four other friends were leasing rooms there.

The visit was one of roughly three dozen others in recent months to address residents' complaints related to potential group homes in their neighborhoods.

For West Valley cities like Glendale and Surprise, they’re using their municipal codes to crack down on unlicensed sober living homes. They’ve also been comparing notes with neighboring towns to understand their experiences with troublesome homes.

The tightened restrictions are aimed at pressuring companies that have exploited the state Medicaid system in a massive fraud.

Usually organized and protected as LLCs, unscrupulous sober living homes have conspired with fraudulent therapy providers. They have ripped off many hundreds of vulnerable, largely Native American seeking rehab. Dozens of bad actors provided little or no service but billed the state anyway.

Glendale Deputy City Manager Rick St. John boasted the city's efforts are making a difference.

“I did have one group of sober living homes … they had a consultant tell me that Glendale had some of the most restrictive processes in place,” St. John said.

“And in his mind,” St. John continued, “that was a good thing because it was keeping some of the bad actors from taking advantage of people and just taking the money.”

Resident, city observations

The state attorney general’s office and health services department continue investigating Arizona’s sober living home crisis.

In court, state prosecutors alleged that there have been more than three dozen people and companies involved in the scheme by posing as addiction counseling services. They’ve bilked the state Medicaid program out of $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion for services never provided, the state alleges.

Native Americans are believed to have been targeted by the groups for the scheme, with some being kidnapped off the streets from the Four Corners area and beyond.

For a year, the focus on addressing the issue of sober living homes has largely centered on the East Valley, especially in Mesa, where the matter recently reached a tipping point. Residents there and in Gilbert have implored city leaders to get a grip on the situation.

But in the West Valley, city officials saw an influx of similar complaints. Residents, in otherwise more affluent, quiet neighborhoods, saw sober living homes crop up. Then they reported disturbances there.

“We get information from our police department, fire department, and mainly from our community,” St. John said of how the city locates potential group homes. “It’s usually the neighbors that call us saying ‘Hey, I know this is a rental property, it’s been vacant for a few months … there’s a lot of activity.’ I’d say that’s probably 90%" of how they're located.

Based on the records the city provided, Glendale’s code enforcement officers investigated 42 cases of possible sober living homes since last March. More than a dozen of those cases, however, were closed when officers determined there wasn’t one operating.

In at least five of the cases, homes were found to either be vacant or were simply rental properties.

A few others that officers inspected ended up being homes for the developmentally disabled, or for assisted living or senior care. And in one case, officers found that a family of six, plus a friend and her boyfriend, lived together in a house, which a neighbor thought was a group home.

Over in Surprise, code enforcement officers last year investigated 140 such cases, according to Assistant Director of Community Development Tiffany Copp.

“Our code enforcement began seeing an uptick in unusual resident complaints, unusual for our growing community,” Copp told lawmakers at a state Senate Health and Human Services Committee hearing regarding the proposed sober living home measure, Senate Bill 1361.

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“We had increased calls for service that appeared to be of a domestic nature when they were kicked out to law enforcement. But they responded to these homes and found there were assaults and other violent crimes occurring among people who seemingly didn’t know each other, living in these homes,” she added.

Others included incidents of indecent exposure to children and people passed out in public.

Police responded to one overdose death in a home, she said.

Officers also encountered people who were lost, “not knowing how they got there, not knowing where they were or how to get where they wanted to be,” said Copp.

Out of the 140 cases Surprise code enforcement officers investigated, they closed 135 of them, according to Copp. Nine civil citations for code violations were also issued. The city did not provide a number of problem properties.

To help get a few of the unlicensed locations closed, the officers contacted property owners who rented the homes but were not directly involved in managing the leases.

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“In many of those instances, the owner had no idea their property was being rented for such activity and participated in the process to get the unlicensed (sober living home) off premises,” she said in an email.

Concerned that the sober living home operators were just setting up shop in a neighboring town after being shut down in another, officials in Glendale and Surprise held meetings with their counterparts from other West Valley cities.

“There have been two meetings in the past year with West Valley cities to discuss what everyone is seeing with sober living homes,” St. John said.

According to Copp, Surprise staff has also spoken with groups interested in the issue, such as homeowners' associations, police and fire chiefs as well as the League of Arizona Cities and Towns. They’ve also been communicating with public safety officials from Goodyear, including police officer Scott Daniel, who also testified during the senate hearing this month.

“Other cities have called or invited us out to speak to them on our experiences and citywide response to this crisis,” Copp wrote. “I believe some of those cities that have heard us speak have taken tools from our toolbox and modeled their response accordingly.”

Putting up barriers

While SB 1361 moves through the State Senate to tighten restrictions regulating sober living homes, Glendale and Surprise have used those very tools, relying on their own licensing requirements.

On top of needing a state license, operators must also apply for a business license from the respective city, meet distance requirements to separate sober living homes from one another, and obtain a certificate of occupancy.

If a manager running a home isn’t meeting the city’s requirements, code enforcement gives them two warnings before they’re slapped with a civil citation, according to the city of Glendale. A criminal citation is later issued if the operator refuses to shut down.

For Glendale, the licensing requirement on group homes is relatively new, with the city putting it into practice a year ago, according to St. John.

Copp noted that Surprise’s licensing requirement has been on the books for many years and wasn’t specifically adopted to address sober living homes, “though it became one of our most powerful tools in responding to (the) crisis.”

Surprise didn’t have sober living homes licensed last fall, according to Copp. Now, there are three, all properly licensed through the state and city.

Since Glendale started requiring the local business license, resident complaints for problems associated with these unlicensed homes have gone down.

“What we’re seeing is much fewer complaints from the community and much fewer applications,” St. John said.

In 2023, the city had about 55 separate business applications for group homes — an umbrella term that covers sober living and assisted living homes, and homes for the developmentally disabled. St. John said code enforcement officers investigated or completed inquiries into each of them, determining that about 80% to 90% were for halfway homes.

“Of the handful, of the 55 applications, I would say about four actually made it through and got licensed and are operating now, and they were all for sober living,” he said.

Because of Glendale’s stricter barriers to operating a halfway home within the city, many applicants, give up in the process after finding it too cumbersome, according to St. John.

Brenda Combs, co-founder and executive director of Making Things Better Sober Living — the company that couldn’t afford the sprinkler system — agreed that the requirements made it difficult for the company, which operates five other homes in Phoenix.

“I’m not going to go through Glendale again,” she said, laughing. “We will do everything in Phoenix. The people (in Glendale) are nice, but the process is kind of demanding.”

Combs previously struggled with addiction and spent time in and out of sober living homes herself. She and her business partner, Mark Carter, started the company in 2011.

Based on an Arizona Republic review, Making Things Better was not on the list of nearly 300 providers whose payments have been suspended by the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System as a result of the statewide scheme.

Combs said the company had purchased the Glendale house to use as a location for only women.

“We redid the floors and just made it a really beautiful home,” she said, adding, “What I did not know was the differences between the sober living requirements in Glendale were vastly different from the sober living requirements in Phoenix.”

As part of the application process, she said, Glendale wanted the company to connect the house to the city’s water line. The quote she received was for about $30,000 to $40,000. That’s on top of the $7,000 to $12,000 the company would have spent to install the sprinklers.

In the end, the company surrendered its Arizona Department of Health Services license for the Glendale home. Now, Combs said, the company is using the house solely as a rental.

Asked for her thoughts on the city’s efforts to tamp down on unlicensed homes to prevent more instances of fraud the state has been seeing, Combs called the requirements “necessary given how many people were abusing the system.”

“I’m glad someone blew the whistle and I’m glad some of these places have shut down,” she said. “Now, hopefully, the good places can continue to help people. I just hope the state doesn’t make it more difficult or more expensive for these licenses.”

Shawn Raymundo covers the West Valley cities of Glendale, Peoria and Surprise. Reach him at sraymundo@gannett.com or follow him on X @ShawnzyTsunami.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: West Valley cities crack down on unlicensed sober living homes