About this Sober House
Blackstone Street is a Fresh Start Sober Living of Maine recovery home in Bangor, Maine, at 52 Blackstone Street. Bangor is in Penobscot County, and this house came into the organization's hands in November 2021 as its ninth property.
About Blackstone Street
Fresh Start records the addition in one line: November of 2021 brought the acquisition of a 9th property. By then the organization had been buying and opening houses in Bangor and Brewer for three years, and Blackstone Street was part of the stretch of expansion that also brought in houses on Catell Street and elsewhere in the city during 2021. The house is listed by the operator among its Bangor addresses.
Fresh Start's Ninth Property
The sequence behind that number tells you something about the organization. It started with one house on Ohio Street in October 2018, added a second in Brewer, a third on Warren Street in 2019, a fourth in February 2020 and a fifth that August, and kept going. The organization now says it owns 21 sober living residences, housing more than 150 people who are living with substance use disorder. A resident at Blackstone Street is therefore living in one house of a network that has been operating continuously in the same small area for years. Size brings a practical benefit as well: an operator with houses across a single city can move someone between them when circumstances change, without that person having to leave the town, the job or the meetings they have settled into.
Who the Fresh Start Homes Serve
Fresh Start states that its homes are open to both men and women seeking a healthy, stable and supportive lifestyle, with each individual house run as a single-gender residence. The organization's stated mission is to support people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction by creating and maintaining safe housing, and it describes the mechanism as community: residents supporting each other, sharing responsibilities and building a foundation for their recovery together.
A recovery residence is housing with structure rather than a clinical program: a drug and alcohol free household, shared by people in recovery, run to rules everyone in the building has agreed to. Fresh Start publishes its house rules and a member handbook, updated in September 2025, and its admissions route runs through an application, an intake assessment and an interview, followed by orientation once a place is taken up. Controlled medications are kept securely and managed by the house manager.
Sober Living in Bangor, Penobscot County
Bangor sits in Penobscot County and acts as the service center for a large part of eastern Maine, which is why so much of the region's recovery housing is here. Fresh Start's houses are distributed across the city and into Brewer, and the operator says they sit on the bus route and close to services, so a resident can reach work and appointments without a car. The organization also runs houses jointly with local partners, including the Bangor Area Recovery Network and the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter, which keeps its residents connected to the wider recovery community in the county. The organization's administrative office is on Center Street in Bangor, so the people running the houses are based in the same city as the people living in them.
Certification and Standards
Fresh Start Sober Living of Maine displays certification from the Maine Association of Recovery Residences and describes itself as the first MARR-certified recovery residence north of Augusta. MARR publishes a register of the recovery residences it has certified across the state; that register is where the current certification standing of any Maine sober living home should be checked before a placement is made.
