Area Substance Abuse Council

About Area Substance Abuse Council

The Area Substance Abuse Council is a recovery home operator based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, running transitional recovery housing in Linn County and Clinton County. Known throughout eastern Iowa as ASAC, it works from fourteen locations across seven counties and delivers prevention, outpatient treatment, residential care, recovery services and housing under one organization.

An Eastern Iowa Recovery Housing Provider Inside a Full Continuum

Housing is the last link in a chain this organization owns end to end. Someone can enter through prevention or an outpatient assessment, move through residential treatment, and end up in an apartment run by the same nonprofit, keeping the same care navigator and peer recovery coach the whole way. The organization describes recovery as a bridge that eliminates the gaps after treatment, and its transitional housing exists to close the largest of those gaps, which is where a person sleeps in the months after discharge.

Two Long-Term Transitional Recovery Homes in Eastern Iowa

The operator runs two long-term transitional living communities:

• The Way Home, on Kirkwood Boulevard SW in Cedar Rapids, a twenty-four unit apartment community.
• New Directions Housing, on South 19th Street in Clinton, a ten-unit apartment community.

Both are equipped with resources that support recovery, and both are built for families instead of single adults sharing bedrooms. Thirty-four units of family-sized recovery housing is a substantial share of what exists anywhere in Iowa, and it lets the organization keep a household together during the period when separation is most likely to end a recovery.

Who These Recovery Homes Accept

Tenant criteria follow HUD and Affordable Housing Network guidelines, with priority given to people who recently completed substance use disorder treatment. Income must be below fifty percent of the regional median. Applicants need at least two months of verifiable employment, every bedroom must be occupied by an adult or a child, nobody may appear on the sex offender registry, and all applicants agree to the complex rules. Applications are made through an ASAC counselor or directly to the organization.

Care Navigation Alongside the Sober Living Program

Housing is paired with two services that determine whether a tenancy survives. Care navigation links residents to childcare, transportation and employment. Peer recovery coaching connects them with former patients who have been through the same sequence. Staff also work directly on finding employment and long-term living arrangements, so a resident's exit from transitional housing is planned instead of improvised.

Where This Iowa Sober Living Operator Reaches

Fourteen locations spread across seven eastern Iowa counties give the operator offices in Cedar Rapids, Clinton, Dubuque, Anamosa, Vinton, Manchester and Maquoketa, alongside residential programs and a recovery center. That reach means a person referred from a rural county rarely has to leave the region for care, and the housing sits inside the same network that provided the treatment.

Evaluating a Recovery Housing Provider in a State Without a Registry

Iowa has no NARR affiliate. Certification intake sits with the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services under a published recovery housing protocol and checklist, participation is voluntary for providers not seeking state money, and no public roster of certified residences exists. In that setting, an operator's licensure, its length of service and the written criteria it publishes for its own housing are the record a family can actually examine.