Steps House Women's Residence - Lippencott Street Women's Recovery House

About this Recovery House

Steps House Women's Residence - Lippencott Street is a women's sober house in Knoxville, Tennessee, in Knox County. Steps House, Inc. operates it as one of three women's addresses among the eight houses it runs in the city.

A Women's Sober House in South Knoxville

The house serves women. Lippencott Street sits in the South Knoxville neighborhoods below the Tennessee River bluffs, a residential area of older houses on small lots off the Chapman Highway corridor. The rest of this operator's South Knoxville houses are a short distance away on and around Valley Avenue, which means a resident is inside a small local network without sharing a household with it.

What a Single-Gender Recovery Residence Settles

A women's house answers a set of questions that a coed house has to keep answering. Bathrooms, bedrooms, house meetings and common space all belong to one population, and the house rules are written for one household. For a woman leaving treatment or a domestic situation she is not going back to, that is often the deciding factor, and it is the reason single-gender recovery housing tends to fill faster than coed housing in the same county. Ask whether children can visit, and under what conditions, since policies on that differ sharply between women's houses.

Knox County Recovery Housing for Women

Knoxville is the seat of Knox County and the service center for East Tennessee, which is why women's recovery housing in the region concentrates here. The courts, the county health department, the outpatient providers and the largest employers are all inside the city, one bridge crossing from South Knoxville. Knoxville Area Transit serves the Chapman Highway corridor nearby. Women coming out of treatment in the surrounding mountain counties frequently move to Knoxville because it is the nearest place where childcare, a job and an appointment can coexist in one week.

Questions to Ask This Women's Sober Living Home

Tennessee requires recovery residences to be certified, and the state has two certifying bodies, the Tennessee Alliance of Recovery Residences and Recovery is the New High. Ask which one certifies this house. Ask for the fee schedule and house rules in writing, ask who is on site overnight, ask how often testing is done and what follows a positive test, and ask whether medication for opioid use disorder is accepted. Ask what the house expects in the first thirty days, because the answer tells a prospective resident what kind of household she is joining.