No parent plans to raise a child who ends up navigating the cold floors of a shelter instead of the warmth of a family home. No child dreams of growing into an adult who cycles through the system, one inpatient treatment center after another, looking for a place to lay their head once the detox wears off. Yet this is the reality many Detroiters face when the high wears off but the trauma remains.
Detroit has taken a significant step toward expanding its network of recovery housing for individuals battling substance use disorders. With funding secured through national opioid settlement agreements, the city is allocating over $2 million across a set of long-term contracts aimed at not only treating addiction but sustaining recovery through stable housing.
Self Help Addiction Rehabilitation (SHAR) and Second Chance 2000 were formally selected by the Detroit City Council on Tuesday, April 2, with SHAR receiving a $1.2 million contract and Second Chance awarded $806,436. The contracts span three years and are part of a broader push to ensure residents in recovery can find structured, safe environments once they’ve completed inpatient care. The initiative is about disrupting the pipeline that leads people from treatment back to trauma, from hospital discharge to homelessness.
In 2023, Detroit accounted for 430 opioid-related deaths, representing over 15% of Michigan’s total overdose fatalities. This figure underscores the city’s struggle with opioid misuse and its devastating impact on the community. Moreover, the Detroit Fire Department reported administering naloxone—a life-saving overdose reversal drug—2,400 times that year, highlighting the frequency and severity of overdose incidents within the city.
Statewide, Michigan has witnessed alarming racial disparities in overdose deaths. In 2022, Black residents comprised 28% of the state’s 2,998 overdose fatalities. Preliminary data from the first half of 2023 indicates that Black Michiganders were overdosing at a rate 2.7 times higher than their white counterparts. This disproportionate impact is particularly evident in Detroit, where Black residents accounted for almost half of all overdose deaths in the state. Over the past five years, Black men aged 60 to 69 have experienced the highest overdose rates in Michigan. These statistics reveal a critical need for targeted interventions and resources to address the specific challenges faced by Black Detroiters in combating the opioid epidemic.
Recovery housing is often the missing piece in the addiction treatment puzzle. Completing inpatient treatment is one milestone but maintaining recovery while reentering society is another challenge altogether. Without housing, that transition becomes even more difficult. Some recovery homes operate with integrated treatment programs, offering group therapy and outpatient support. Others prioritize stability through supportive peer environments. Both are necessary, especially in cities like Detroit, where structural inequities intersect with substance abuse crises.
Second Chance 2000 serves Black men aged 25 to 44—a demographic that is often overrepresented in incarceration rates and underrepresented in wraparound recovery services. This contract adds eight additional beds to their existing capacity, potentially raising the total number to 23. Participants at Second Chance are permitted to stay up to a year, offering a rare window of stability that is critical for long-term success. A year is time to rebuild trust, seek employment, reconnect with family, and restore dignity.
SHAR, which serves both women and men, provides recovery stays of up to 120 days. Their new funding expands the women’s unit by 18 beds. Over three years, this unit will serve 216 women. Meanwhile, the men’s unit, which includes 20 beds, is projected to serve 240 individuals during the same contract term. These numbers matter because they reflect an acknowledgment of real human need and a strategy for scalable impact.
What makes these programs effective is much more than just bed count—it’s the infrastructure that supports the bed. Both SHAR and Second Chance include access to transportation for inpatient and outpatient services, behavioral health care, primary care, peer recovery coaches, and case managers who help residents map out a recovery plan that includes more than just sobriety. It includes stability. It includes a second or even third chance. And it includes the hope that someone is investing in your future when society once discarded your past.
Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries and Mariners Inn are also on deck to potentially receive funding through future contracts. Both have longstanding reputations within Detroit’s recovery and housing networks. While those contracts are still pending, their anticipated inclusion signals the city’s intent to build a more comprehensive and collaborative recovery housing system.
Detroit’s participation in the national opioid settlement has made this expansion possible. These settlement dollars are a result of legal action taken against pharmaceutical companies whose aggressive marketing and distribution practices fueled the opioid epidemic across the country. While no dollar amount can undo the generational trauma caused by addiction—especially in communities that were already under-resourced—the settlement funds offer cities like Detroit an opportunity to repair, reinvest, and reimagine recovery.
Too often, addiction is treated like an individual moral failing instead of a public health issue compounded by poverty, lack of access to mental health services, racial disparities in medical treatment, and structural disinvestment. Recovery housing, particularly in a city like Detroit, pushes back on that narrative. It creates space for healing that does not rely on punishment. It affirms that people deserve dignity after detox.
Detroit is a city where recovery must mean more than survival. It must include belonging. SHAR’s commitment to serving both women and men reflects the city’s understanding that addiction does not discriminate by gender, but recovery often needs to. Women navigating recovery often have histories of trauma that require different kinds of support than men. They are more likely to be primary caregivers and less likely to have stable housing options after inpatient care. Adding 18 beds to the women’s unit at SHAR sends a clear message: Black women in recovery are not invisible.
Meanwhile, Second Chance is creating a pathway for men who have been written off by the system. The name itself carries weight. Second Chance isn’t just a title—it’s an intention. A man recovering from addiction in Detroit isn’t just fighting to stay clean—he’s fighting for employment, for housing, for custody, for peace. Giving him a year in a supportive environment can change the trajectory of his entire family.
Detroit’s Office of Contracting and Procurement recommended these selections after a review process that prioritized organizations with proven track records and community credibility. This isn’t about experimentation—it’s about executing strategies that center human need and sustainability.
Every new bed represents a real person who will no longer have to choose between recovery and shelter. Every contract dollar signals a city that is no longer willing to treat addiction with one-off solutions. This investment says Detroit understands recovery requires infrastructure, not charity. It requires planning, not pity.
There’s no easy fix to addiction. That truth cuts deep across communities, especially Black communities where addiction is often criminalized rather than treated. But when cities move from punishment to possibility, from disconnection to wraparound care, lives change. Recovery becomes less about managing symptoms and more about creating a life worth staying clean for.
The expansion of recovery housing is a necessary response to a crisis that was long ignored and disproportionately shouldered by marginalized populations. This is not just a step forward—it’s a course correction.
Detroit’s approach recognizes that access to treatment must be met with access to housing, transportation, therapy, and peer support. These elements, together, form the web that keeps people from falling back into the cycles they fought so hard to escape. The city’s decision to allocate settlement funds this way shows an understanding that systems of care must be holistic. Detroit is designing a blueprint for what that can look like.
Families who have watched loved one’s cycle in and out of treatment know that the work does not end when a program is completed. That’s when the real work begins. Detroit’s investment in recovery housing is a declaration: our people deserve more than temporary fixes. They deserve futures.
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