Editorial: New guidelines offer hope for clampdown on sober homes
Delray Beach is wasting little time. Just days after the release of revised federal guidelines, Delray officials have begun revising several ordinances meant to curb the spread of sober homes — the first action by a local government in a long time to control the proliferation of group houses for recovering drug addicts that have overwhelmed neighborhoods in Delray and other towns in South Florida.
Delray Beach Mayor Cary Glickstein told the Post Editorial Board last week that he hopes a measure will be ready for review by the city’s Planning and Zoning Board next month. The City Commission could be considering action by January, Glickstein said.
That’s an abrupt change after a long period of passivity. With few exceptions, local governments quit trying to enact codes or zoning for sober homes after Boca Raton was successfully sued over a 2003 ordinance that sought to keep drug-rehab places out of residential neighborhoods.
Let’s be clear. People struggling with addiction — like the 216 people profiled in today’s Post who died of overdoses in Palm Beach County in 2015 — need help. Often, desperate help. Addiction, as the U.S. Surgeon General said last week, is a national public health crisis that needs to come out of the shadows.
But well-intended federal laws like the Fair Housing Act and Americans with Disabilities Act, meant to prevent discrimination against vulnerable people, including those with drug and alcohol addictions, have been turned into shields for the shady side of the sober home industry: those bad actors who exploit people in recovery while setting up slapped-together group homes that disrupt residential neighborhoods with transient households, police calls and, increasingly, overdoses.
Glickstein, whose city is at the center of all this, has been emboldened by the release, on Nov. 10, of a “joint statement” from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Justice. It’s meant to clarify what cities can do to maintain the safety and character of their communities without running afoul of those federal laws.
U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, sought the document after witnessing how cities were struggling against the sober-home tide, and delivered it after a year and half of effort.
The 20-page statement is no magic wand, and it seems more concerned about the rights of recovering addicts than the plight of neighborhoods. And yet it may give cities just enough leverage to be useful.
“The joint statement has expanded our tool box,” Glickstein said, “in a meaningful way.”
He said that for the first time, the feds have made it clear that zoning and land use are inherently local decisions. It says that while local governments must make “reasonable accommodations” for people in recovery, “the Fair Housing Act does not prevent state or local governments from taking into account concerns about the over-concentration of group homes that are located in close proximity to each other.”
Cities can also act if they can show that a concentration of sober homes creates a financial or administrative burden on a city — such as the burden on fire-rescue units to spend heavy amounts of money and time on emergency overdose calls in certain sections of the city, leaving other areas underserved, Glickstein said.
To be sure, this doesn’t solve everything. A city like Delray will need the guts to defend any such ordinance against the inevitable court challenge. But Glickstein, himself a lawyer, expresses confidence that the joint statement should provide a sound foundation for defensible ordinances. “It should be persuasive, especially in courts that have struggled with older legislation that may be silent on current issues,” he says.
Frankel, a former mayor of West Palm Beach, deserves credit for delivering this potentially potent tool to South Florida’s localities. It’s giving towns like Delray an opening they should use to fight back against a wave of disorder that has plagued our neighborhoods for too long.
