About this Recovery House
Dickson Sober Living - Center Avenue is a men's sober living home in Dickson, Tennessee, the largest city in Dickson County. A Design for Living Recovery Homes operates it, and it is the only house in the operator's eleven-home network that sits outside Nashville. The program is the same one the company runs in the city, in a town of a very different size.
A Men's Sober House in Dickson
Center Avenue is a residential street in Dickson, and the house serves men. The operator's own case for this address is that a resident gets the structure and the amenities of its Nashville homes in a small city, and that Dickson has a solid recovery community of its own. That trade is real. A man who relapsed twice in the neighborhoods where he used has a legitimate reason to want fifty minutes of distance from them, and someone whose family and job are in Middle Tennessee's western counties has a reason to stay near home.
Five Bedrooms and Three Bathrooms in This Sober Living Home
The operator describes the Dickson house as five bedrooms and three bathrooms, with a custom kitchen, a large living room, front porch, back deck and rooftop terrace, running over 2,500 square feet. Five bedrooms is the largest configuration in the network, so this is the house with the biggest household and the lowest cost per resident. Bedrooms are shared, furnishings and electronics are provided, and the square footage means the household is not on top of each other in the evenings.
Twelve-Step Structure in a Small-City Recovery Residence
Staff are on site twenty-four hours a day. Twelve-step meetings and book studies run in the house, sponsorship is expected, testing for drugs and alcohol is frequent, and the house manager holds a weekly meeting on life skills. Service work at food banks and other nonprofits is part of the routine. In a smaller city that in-house meeting schedule carries more weight than it does in Nashville, because the outside meeting list is shorter and the drive between meetings is longer.
Dickson County Recovery Housing and the Interstate 40 Corridor
Dickson sits on Interstate 40 west of Nashville, which makes it the practical hinge between the city and the rural counties beyond it. Charlotte is the seat of Dickson County, and county offices, the courthouse and the health department are there, while the hospital, the retail and most of the jobs are in Dickson itself. The interstate matters to a resident: an outpatient provider, a specialist or a court date in Nashville is one straight drive, and a bus or a ride from a housemate makes it doable without a car. Dickson County recovery housing is thin, so a certified operator running a men's house here covers a county that has few alternatives.
A Certified Sober Living Operator Based in Nashville
The house is operated by a certified operator, listed with the Tennessee Alliance of Recovery Residences. Certification means a published code of ethics, fees and rules in writing before move-in, a written relapse and discharge policy, and a complaint route outside the house. The owner, Justin Coggins, is in recovery himself and runs the whole network under one program. A resident who starts in Dickson and later wants to be in Nashville, or the reverse, applies to the same operator and keeps the same expectations.
