Healthcare Alternative Systems Transitional Housing Program Men's Recovery Home

About this Recovery Home

Healthcare Alternative Systems Transitional Housing Program in Chicago, Illinois, is a recovery residence for men. It occupies a Cook County address at the Logan Square end of Milwaukee Avenue.

Transitional Housing on Milwaukee Avenue

The program's address is 1866 North Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue is one of Chicago's historic diagonal streets, running northwest out of the Loop through Wicker Park and Logan Square, and the CTA Blue Line follows the same corridor. A man entering this program without a car is not stranded by that fact, and a job in another part of the city is not out of his reach either.

Built for Men Leaving Homelessness

Healthcare Alternative Systems designed the program to equip adult men experiencing homelessness to reach long-term recovery. The housing is the first thing supplied rather than the reward for having assembled everything else first. For a man who has been sleeping in a shelter or outdoors, that ordering is the whole difference, because nothing else on the list is achievable from the street.

Job Training, Education and a Housing Plan

Residents receive job training, education and help developing a housing plan while they live on site. The housing plan is the piece that decides what happens next. A man who leaves with an identified next address stands in a wholly different position from one who leaves with a list of numbers to call. Training and education work the same way over a longer horizon, because the income that keeps the next address is what the plan finally rests on.

Recovery Coaches and Peer Mentors

Support inside the residence comes from staff, recovery coaches and peer mentors, rather than from the housing alone. A peer mentor is someone who has been through the same thing, which is a different sort of authority from a professional one and reaches a resident in a different way.

Housing First as the Operating Rule

Healthcare Alternative Systems works on a housing-first basis and attaches no preconditions or program-completion requirements before someone can be housed. In practice a man is not asked to prove a stretch of sobriety, or to finish a course, before a door opens to him. For transitional housing aimed at people coming off the street, any other rule would screen out the exact population the program exists to serve.

The Organization Behind the House

IAEC lists Healthcare Alternative Systems among Illinois' certified recovery residence providers, so the housing carries a recovery residence credential of its own. The organization's other residence, the men's residential program, is at 1949 North Humboldt Boulevard, also on the Northwest Side of Chicago inside Cook County.