About this Recovery House
Emerald House is a men's recovery residence in Montebello, New York, in Rockland County, on Emerald Lane. Lexington Center for Recovery operates it as a 16-bed community residence for men aged 18 to 65 in the reintegration stage of recovery from a substance use disorder.
A Men's Recovery Home With Sixteen Beds
The house holds sixteen men and runs around the clock. Room and board come with the placement, in a semi-independent, secure setting, which is the phrase the organization uses and the right one: residents live with real independence and a real front door, with staff available and expectations that apply every day. Everyone here is past the acute stage, which makes the peer group unusually aligned on what it is working toward.
Thirty Hours a Week of Recovery Work
Residents maintain a 30 hour weekly schedule made up of outpatient treatment, volunteering, educational programming and employment. That is the rule the whole house is built around. It answers the hardest question in early recovery, which is what to do with Tuesday afternoon, and it does so by requiring the resident to build an answer with help from staff who know the local employers, colleges and programs.
What This Sober Living Residence Provides
Case management, individual counseling, support and life skills groups, AA and NA meetings, gender specific support, recreational activities, relapse prevention and vocational and educational referrals all sit inside the program. Length of stay depends on individual progress. The vocational and educational referral piece is what distinguishes reintegration housing from a bed: a man leaving here is expected to leave with a job or a school schedule already running.
Montebello and Suffern as a Setting for Recovery Housing
Montebello is a village inside the town of Ramapo, in western Rockland County near the New Jersey line. Suffern sits immediately south with a Metro-North station on the Port Jervis Line, a hospital and a downtown, and the New York State Thruway runs past the village. A resident without a car can reach work, appointments and meetings in Suffern, Airmont and Spring Valley on local transit, and family visiting from New York City can get here by train.
Rockland County Recovery Homes and the Regional Network
New City, the county seat, is about twenty minutes east. Lexington Center for Recovery runs clinics in Airmont, Haverstraw and Valley Cottage and a second men's community residence across the river in Mount Kisco, Westchester County. A resident whose family or work sits on the other side of the Hudson can raise a transfer with staff who already know his history, and the program requirements travel with him.
Certification and This Montebello Sober House
The residence is certified by the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports, and certification of recovery housing in New York is voluntary. What a certified program commits to is concrete: defined staffing, clinical oversight, written admission and discharge policy, incident reporting and state inspection. The application process an organization goes through is documented in the OASAS certification guide.
