Anchor House

About Anchor House

Anchor House is a sober living operator in Brooklyn, New York, running state-certified residential recovery homes in Kings County. It has housed people in addiction recovery in this borough since 1967.

A Brooklyn Recovery Housing Provider Since 1967

Reverend Alfredo Cotto-Thorner started the organization in 1967 at South Third Street United Methodist Church in Brooklyn. Nearly six decades later it still operates in the same borough. Longevity is not a guarantee of quality, and it does establish something a new operator cannot claim: this one has survived multiple funding regimes, multiple drug epidemics and multiple changes in how New York regulates residential addiction care, and it is still admitting residents.

Two Sober Living Addresses in Crown Heights

Anchor House runs two residences, both in central Brooklyn:

• Anchor House, Inc. (Bergen Street), on Bergen Street in Brooklyn, the men's residence, with 50 beds.
• Anchor House, Inc. (Park Place), on Park Place in Brooklyn, the women's residence, with 28 beds.

Seventy-eight beds a few blocks apart. The proximity is useful in a practical way: the staff, the clinical partnerships and the referral relationships serve both houses, and a resident's outpatient providers and meetings stay reachable regardless of which building they live in.

Men's and Women's Sober Houses Kept Separate

Every Anchor House bed is single-gender at the building level. Men apply to Bergen Street and women to Park Place, and neither house mixes. That structure means house rules, group work and shared space are written for one population, and nobody is the only woman in a building of fifty. The women's house has run since 1996 and expanded in 2013, so the commitment to women's beds is not recent.

Certification Across This Operator's Recovery Homes

Both residences are certified by the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Supports as Part 820 residential services. Certification is granted address by address, so an operator carrying it on both houses has been through the process twice. New York does not require recovery residences to hold any certification, which makes a fully certified portfolio a meaningful public record in a state where a great deal of sober housing carries none.

Applying to This Brooklyn Sober Living Operator

Applications go to the organization, which serves adults 18 and older and runs intensive residential programs of 12 to 18 months. The questions worth asking at the operator level are different from the ones about a particular house: how long the organization has held its state certification, which treatment providers and courts refer to it, what funding and insurance it accepts, how fees are documented, and how a complaint escalates past the house to the operator and then to the state.