Insights: Are Some Sober Living Homes in Massachusetts Only Around for the Money?

When Massachusetts Sober Living Homes Put Profit First

Sober living homes are meant to be steady places where people rebuild after treatment. Routines form, trust gets repaired, accountability becomes ordinary. Most homes do that work well. A minority never intended to.

The gap between those two matters more in Massachusetts than in many states, because a sober living home here can open in a private residence with almost no oversight. Certification is voluntary. That makes it the single most useful filter a resident or family has, and there are 269 certified homes in Massachusetts in this directory that have chosen it. What follows is what happens when nobody is checking, and how to tell the difference before you move in.

The David Perry Case

David Perry, a former attorney, ran several sober living homes in Roxbury through an organization called Recovery Educational Services. He presented himself as a person in recovery who wanted to help others stay sober.

According to court records, he used that position against the residents who depended on him. His conduct included:

• Offering legal help and reduced rent in exchange for sex
• Providing drugs to residents while claiming to support their recovery
• Falsifying drug test results submitted to probation officers
• Exploiting people who relied on him for housing

Perry pled guilty to 36 criminal charges, including drug distribution and forgery, and was sentenced to two and a half years. Reports described continued misconduct while he was incarcerated, including smuggling Suboxone into jail. One former employee said he showed no real care for the people living in his homes.

None of his homes were ever certified or formally reviewed.

Why Massachusetts Sober Living Homes Can Operate Without Oversight

A recovery residence is housing rather than treatment. It provides no clinical care, so it is generally not licensed the way a treatment program is, and it is treated much like any other residential use. Federal fair housing law goes further and limits how far a city can regulate it, since people in recovery are a protected class and a municipality can be required to make a reasonable accommodation rather than zone recovery housing out.

Those protections exist for good reason. They are what stops a neighborhood from voting recovery housing off its street. The side effect is that quality is left to voluntary standards, so problems usually surface only after somebody is harmed.

Without standards in place, a home can drift into:

• Drug use happening inside the house
• Overcrowding that creates stress and safety risks
• No screening or background checks on operators
• Little structure, no written rules, and no accountability

For someone in early recovery, any one of those can end a stay badly.

What MASH Certification Actually Requires

The Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing certifies homes against the NARR standard. It is voluntary, and a home that wants it has to earn it:

• Passing safety and property inspections
• Following structured house rules and recovery guidelines
• Providing a stable, supportive living environment
• Completing training for operators and staff

Certification is not decorative. Homes have lost it for failing to keep the standard, which is what makes it worth checking. MASH publishes its own list of certified residences, and it is the authoritative register to cross-check against anything you read anywhere else, including here.

When Profit Takes Over a Sober Living Home

Sober living can generate real monthly income in a high-demand area, and records connected to Perry’s operation showed projected profits of more than $64,000 a month. Revenue at that level attracts operators with no interest in recovery at all.

Once the money leads, the pattern is recognizable:

• Residents treated as income rather than people in recovery
• Maintenance and safety deferred to hold down costs
• No real support structure behind the marketing
• Vulnerable residents pushed into situations they cannot refuse

One bad operator reaches further than one house. Families hesitate, communities resist the next home that tries to open, and operators running good houses spend years answering for someone else.

Warning Signs to Watch For

On a tour or a first phone call, a few things separate a serious home from a rent collector.

• No written house rules, or rules nobody can produce when asked
• Vagueness about what rent includes and what is due on day one
• No drug and alcohol screening, or screening with no stated consequence
• More beds in a room than the room can reasonably hold
• No certification, and no clear answer about why not

Written expectations are the tell. A home that runs on real house rules can hand them to you, and a home that cannot is telling you something.

How to Check a Sober Living Home in Massachusetts

Start from the filter rather than the phone book. Browse certified homes in Massachusetts, 269 listed, or open the full Massachusetts directory of 354 homes and narrow by gender, certification status, and affiliation before you call anyone.

Then ask the questions that cost nothing: what the rules are in writing, what happens if someone relapses, and who to call when something goes wrong. Picking a sober house turns on fit as much as anything else, and what sober living costs is a fair question to put to any operator on the first call.

A certified home is not automatically the right home, and an uncertified home is not automatically a bad one. Certification means somebody outside the house has looked. In a state where nobody is required to look, that is worth a great deal.

Sources

• Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing. Certified sober homes.
• National Alliance for Recovery Residences. (2024). NARR standard 3.0.
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. (2026). Recovery housing: Funding sources and financial sustainability (PEP26-08-001).
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Department of Justice. (2004). Joint statement on reasonable accommodations under the Fair Housing Act.
• Sober House Directory listing counts for Massachusetts, retrieved 15 September 2026.