Real House

About Real House Inc.

Real House Inc. is a sober living operator based in Montclair, New Jersey, running recovery housing, halfway houses, emergency shelter and outpatient treatment across Essex, Union and Gloucester counties. The organization has been operating since 2004 and says it has served thousands of people in that time. Its footprint is unusual for a New Jersey recovery housing provider: four sober living addresses, four halfway houses, two shelters, an outpatient program and a long-term residential program, all under one roof organizationally.

A New Jersey Recovery Housing Provider With Several Levels of Care

Most sober living operators do one thing. Real House does five, and the reason that matters to a resident is movement. A person can enter through the shelter, move into the long-term residential program, step down to a halfway house and land in sober living without ever changing organizations, intake staff or paperwork. Each of those transitions is a point where people ordinarily fall out of the system, because each one normally means a new waitlist and a new set of strangers. Keeping them inside one provider removes the waitlist from the equation.

Real House Sober Homes in Essex, Union and Gloucester Counties

Four addresses carry the sober living designation:

• Chilton Avenue in Elizabeth, in Union County.
• Ridge Street in Orange, in Essex County.
• South Street in Newark, in Essex County.
• Harding Highway in Newfield, in Gloucester County.

Three of the four sit within a ten-mile arc around Newark, tied together by NJ Transit rail and dense bus coverage. The fourth is a hundred miles south in rural Gloucester County, at the same address as the organization's long-term residential program. A resident who completes that program in Newfield and wants to stay in South Jersey has somewhere to go; one who wants to return north has three options in the Newark orbit.

Halfway Houses and Shelters Alongside the Sober Living Homes

The organization runs men's halfway houses on Westminster Avenue and East Jersey Avenue in Elizabeth, and women's halfway houses on Hazelwood Road in Bloomfield and South Street in Newark. Two women's shelters operate in Montclair, on Grove Street and North Mountain Avenue, and the shelters run around the clock. An intensive outpatient program in Montclair serves people who are housed elsewhere. Anyone evaluating Real House should be clear which program a bed is actually in, because a halfway house, a shelter and a sober living home carry different rules, different funding and different expectations.

Licensing and Oversight for a New Jersey Sober Living Operator

New Jersey certifies no recovery residences. There is no active NARR affiliate in the state and no state certification program, though legislation to create a voluntary one has been introduced. What governs housing of this kind is the rooming and boarding house code administered by the Department of Community Affairs, under which a cooperative sober living residence is licensed as Class F. Clinical residential treatment is licensed separately, by the Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services. An operator running both kinds of program, as Real House does, sits under both regimes, and a family comparing providers should ask which credential applies to the specific bed being offered. An explainer on licensing a sober living home in New Jersey sets out the distinction.

Serving North Jersey and the Delaware Valley

The geographic split says something about who this operator serves. The northern houses draw from Newark, Elizabeth and the Oranges, three of the densest, most transit-rich and most economically pressed municipalities in the state, where recovery housing competes with a tight rental market. The Newfield house draws from a rural corner where the nearest alternatives can be twenty miles away. Both populations end up in the same organization, which is a rare structure among New Jersey sober homes and a reason the provider's name turns up in referrals from both ends of the state.

Working With This Montclair Sober Living Operator

Referrals and applications go to Real House directly, and the organization runs a pre-screening process before placement. Useful questions at the operator level differ from the ones about a particular house: how long the wait usually runs for a sober living bed, whether the operator accepts county or state funding, how a resident moves between programs, what documentation is required at intake, and how a complaint gets escalated past the house manager. Two decades of continuous operation in three counties is a reasonable basis for expecting clear answers.