California keeps circling the same debate about recovery housing without ever landing on a solution. For more than a decade, lawmakers have introduced bills aimed at sober living homes, recovery residences, and supportive recovery housing. Each effort starts from a reasonable goal: protect residents, safeguard communities, and ensure public dollars are spent responsibly. Yet despite years of legislation, studies, and pilot programs, confusion persists.
The reason is straightforward. California still lacks a clear, enforceable, statewide certification for recovery residences—one that is distinct from treatment and grounded in nationally recognized standards. Without that clarity, recovery housing exists in a policy gray zone. Providers operate under inconsistent rules, counties struggle to decide what they can fund, and residents are often left unsure of what they are actually receiving. The state doesn’t have a recovery housing problem because recovery housing doesn’t work. It has a problem because it refuses to define it correctly.
The good news is that California doesn’t need to invent a solution. It already exists. Across the country, states have increasingly turned to the National Alliance for Recovery Residences, or NARR, as the gold standard for recovery housing. NARR’s national quality standards focus on safety, ethics, resident rights, governance, and accountability, while preserving what makes recovery housing effective: peer support, community, and stability rather than clinical care.
To help states implement these standards, the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, working in partnership with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, developed the Model Recovery Residence Certification Act. The model legislation lays out a clear and practical framework. States establish a certification system, use NARR-based standards to define quality, assign oversight to an independent certifying body, draw firm boundaries between treatment and housing, and align public funding with providers that meet those standards. This framework has been adopted or adapted by multiple states, and it works.
One of California’s biggest challenges has been its ongoing failure to clearly separate treatment from recovery housing. While the two are connected, they are not the same. Treatment is clinical. It involves licensed services, therapy, and medical oversight. Recovery housing is not treatment. It is non-clinical, peer-driven housing designed to support people as they build and sustain recovery in their daily lives.
When the state blurs that distinction, the consequences are predictable. Residents are misled about the services they are receiving. Ethical housing operators are regulated as if they were treatment programs. Treatment providers operate housing without appropriate accountability. Counties and state agencies struggle to determine what they can legally fund. And bad actors exploit the confusion while responsible providers are pushed out.
Certification solves this by drawing a bright, enforceable line. Recovery residences provide housing and recovery support. Treatment providers deliver clinical services. If both exist, the relationship must be transparent and clearly defined.
Over the last ten years, California has attempted to address recovery housing through studies, pilot programs, contracting rules, and Housing First carve-outs. Bills such as AB 2214, AB 285, AB 1696, AB 2893, SB 1438, AB 2479, and most recently AB 255 all reflect a growing acknowledgment that recovery housing matters. But without certification, these efforts remain incomplete. Today, there is still no statewide standard for what qualifies as a recovery residence, no consistent consumer protections for residents, and no objective framework for funding decisions. That vacuum has fueled controversy rather than solutions.
A California Recovery Residence Certification, aligned with the Model Recovery Residence Certification Act and administered by California’s NARR affiliate, would change that. Certification would establish uniform statewide standards, create meaningful consumer protections, clearly distinguish recovery housing from treatment in law and practice, and give counties and the state objective criteria for deciding which homes deserve public support. It would elevate ethical providers, remove bad actors, reduce local zoning and enforcement conflicts, and rebuild public trust in recovery housing as a legitimate and essential part of the recovery continuum.
Most importantly, it would center the safety, dignity, and long-term success of people in recovery, rather than leaving them caught in ongoing policy disputes.
California has an opportunity to lead—not by creating another unique system, but by adopting a proven national model and tailoring it to the state’s needs. Recovery housing works when it is done right. Certification is how California can finally make sure that it is.
