About this Recovery House
Broadway 2 Sober Living is a men's sober house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Allegheny County, known to its operator as B2. It sits on Broadway Avenue in Beechview and is run by Pittsburgh Sober Living, whose first house on this street, B1, is a few doors away. Both are three-quarter way houses for men out of treatment who need a sober address with rules on it.
Two Men's Sober Houses on One Beechview Street
The pairing is unusual and useful. Two separate households on the same block share a neighborhood, a light rail stop and one management team, so a resident who is doing the work but clashing with a housemate can change houses without changing anything else about his week. Each house keeps its own residents, its own manager and its own weekly meeting. Beechview itself is a hillside residential neighborhood in Pittsburgh's South Hills, and the Red Line runs along Broadway Avenue toward Station Square and downtown.
Personal Space Inside a Men's Recovery Home
Pittsburgh Sober Living treats crowding as a recovery issue and commits to large houses with room to be alone in them. This one has a meditation room, a workout room and a living room built around a large television, along with laundry on site, wireless internet throughout and television service in the rooms. For a man who has just come from a detox unit or a rehab dormitory, somewhere to sit by himself without leaving the house is a practical part of staying.
The Weekly House Meeting at This Sober Living Home
Every house in the group holds a weekly meeting that opens with a text study from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and moves on to house business. Grievances, chores and conflicts get raised there instead of festering, and residents are the ones raising them. On-site management handles the rest: curfew, random drug and alcohol testing, and the day-to-day judgment calls. Residents are required to work or to volunteer at an approved charity, and to be involved in a 12-step program.
Zero Tolerance Across These Pittsburgh Recovery Homes
The abstinence rule is absolute and the consequence is stated in advance: a resident who uses is dismissed immediately. Prescribed medication is permitted on the condition that it is taken as prescribed and never shared, exchanged or sold. Searches and tests happen at random or whenever the house manager judges them necessary. The policy is blunt on purpose, and for a resident choosing between houses it is the single most useful thing to understand before moving in, because it applies from the first night.
What to Verify Before Moving Into a Pennsylvania Sober House
The Pennsylvania Alliance of Recovery Residences is the state's NARR affiliate, and certification through it is voluntary, so the burden of asking falls on the applicant. Four questions cover most of it: what the weekly fee includes and what it does not, whether a manager is on site, what happens after a relapse, and how a complaint gets escalated past the house. A certified residence has to answer all four in writing before anyone signs, and any well-run sober house should be able to do the same.
