Residents Just Say No to Recovery Homes

Sandra Sotelo declared a victory for herself and neighbors.

The Amboy Avenue resident expressed pleasure in her successful effort to close two adjacent houses along the street recently opened as havens for recovering drug and alcohol addicts.

“We won,” Sotelo said. “We worked as a community, we pulled as a community to fight all of this.”

Sotelo and others gathered more than 300 signatures in the past month protesting the homes because they feared trouble with the occupants, she said.

Michael Bresnahan, founder and director of the nonprofit Shepherd’s Recovery, said he has terminated his lease on two homes in the 11400 block of Amboy Avenue in face of the opposition.

“Everybody’s lost,” Bresnahan said. “I believe that by not supporting this in the community, that she has done a disservice to the community by not having a resource where the men in the community can get help.”

Bresnahan, an ordained minister and former addict, said, “The opposition was too much. There were too many inaccuracies portrayed. . . . I don’t have the resources to mount a public relations campaign.”

Bresnahan said the recovering addicts who currently occupy one of the Amboy Avenue homes are sober and hard-working and will continue to rent the house independently, but that it will not be considered a recovery center.

“We’re going to have to keep an eye out,” Sotelo said, “to make sure it doesn’t become that.”