Sober houses can be incredibly wonderful places to get your life together and work through deep issues with other people of like mind. Or they can function as an immersive internship program for Hell and the abyss hereafter, as you find yourself stuck in a monotonous cycle of routine tragedies and indignation, as you realize that the people in control of situation are making the situation worse, often through their own suffer. In order to understand how a bad sober house functions, you have to remember the type of people that own sober houses. They are almost always someone in recovery themselves, and this can be either a good thing, or an extremely dangerous thing. The economics of a sober house are actually pretty simple, as it is an industry that lacks any meaningful regulation. You rent a three bedroom house, the going rate for this in the neighborhood I was in is about 1,800 a month. You than fill those rooms with bun beds, get maybe eight or nine adult males living in a tiny Philadelphia rowhouse, charge them each 600 a month, and you can clear 3,000 a month in profit off of very little work. You get a good house manager, who is a junkie or alcoholic in recovery, and you charge him a little less rent to do your work for you. The owner of my sober house didn't actually discount the managers rent... Because I am nearly certain the owner of my sober house was using. He started needing to make money really badly. The month before I moved in, he kicked out everyone because someone had died there, because everyone was using. I came into an empty house, only the house manager was left, and he managed to escape within a week of my arrival. So all of the sudden, instead of making 3,000 a month, he was losing 1,200. The short-sighted solution to this is simple: stop screening applicants. Take anyone off the street, regardless of whether they are interested in recovery or not. And if they get caught using in the house, but are still paying rent, you can't kick them out, because you need the money. On the other hand, if you have someone who really does want to recover, but is having difficulty finding a job, they have to go if they can't pay rent in a week or two. So there I found myself. My rent is always on time, I always attend meetings, I am in many ways a model resident. But the person who I shared a room with, a young hedonistic lawyer corrupted by sloth, he was drinking in the room, and had a "med-card" for week. He just stayed in his bed the entire time, drinking and vaping his pen. In fact, when he first started drinking in the house, he was on Antabuse, which is a drug alcoholics sometimes take to prevent them from drinking. It prevents you from drinking by making you violently ill if you drink while you are on it. And he vomited everywhere. But he didn't clean the vomit. Instead he hid it underneath his bed. And it was all over his sheets. He slept in it for days. The vomit didn't go away until I cleaned it all for him when I had the time to one Sunday morning. And I didn't want him to get kicked out, not until I got in an altercation with him days later (but that is another story). Regardless, the owner knew he was drinking, knew he was using, and didn't do jack shit about it because his parents paid his rent on time. The poor man is not going to recover there. I am not joking when I tell you he did not get out of bed. His life was spent in misery, drinking and smoking and looking at his phone and laying in his own vomit. And that brings me to the joyful ending. I just put down a deposit on an apartment in exactly the neighborhood I want. It is a 10 minute walk to the gym, 5 minutes away from two meetings I attend, and about 20 minutes away from my sponsor. It is clean and nice and full of happiness and promise, and I must thank God dearly for this good fortune and having put such wonderful and fearful obstacles along my way to make the path more interesting. Now I have to find a desk.