Oxford House has enabled peer-run, self-sustaining, and substance-free housing since 1975.
Oxford House has enabled peer-run, self-sustaining, and substance-free housing since 1975.
In 1975, Montgomery County, Maryland decided to close a traditional halfway house because of a lack of funds. However, the men living in that halfway house, including Oxford House's founder Paul Molloy, were not ready to leave.
In 1976 the second Oxford House was opened on Fessenden Street in Washington DC, the first step in Oxford House's underlying goal of Replication.
In 1977 the third Oxford House was opened on Northampton Street in Washington DC, proving that the model can work.
In 1987, the late Bill Spillane, Ph. D., who had retired from NIDA and was teaching at Catholic University School of Social Work in Washington, D.C. followed up on each house application and tracked down the individuals who had moved out.
In 1988, Congress enacted P.L. 100-690, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This act included a provision that required all states to establish a revolving loan fund to provide start-up funds for groups wishing to open sober living environments based on the Oxford House model.
Such loans of $4,000 pay the first month's rent and security deposit and thereby accelerate the rate at which individual recovering people can find affordable housing.
For more than twenty-five years, a DePaul University-based research team has been involved in studying Oxford Houses in order to better understand the role they play in substance abuse recovery. Descriptions of the DePaul past and current research are found below. The national scope of Oxford House and its long history makes it the only recovery house system that has been the subject of so much independent research.
"We found that participants assigned to a communal living Oxford House compared to usual care condition had significantly less substance use and criminal involvement and, significantly better employment outcomes."
DePaul University's Center for Community Research
With passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, expansion of Oxford Houses exploded. During the early 1990s dozens of communities sought to close Oxford Houses located in good neighborhoods because local zoning ordinances restricted the number of unrelated individuals that could live together in a single-family home.
Oxford House set out for national expansion by hiring the first outreach workers to start opening houses in other states.
In 1991, CBS 60 Minutes interviewed Oxford House's founder Paul Molloy and some of its residents to answer the question, "What is Oxford House?"
In over a dozen cases, Federal Courts took time to learn about how Oxford Houses work and came to the conclusion that it is a special sort of family where all the residents work together toward the common goal of becoming comfortable with sobriety without relapse.
In City of Edmonds, WA v. Oxford House, Inc. 514 US 725 (1995), handed down March 5, 1995, the Supreme Court found that the zoning code definition of the term "family" is not a maximum occupancy restriction exempt from the Fair Housing Act.
In 1997, the men and women of Oxford House restructured Oxford House, Inc. by creating an independent Board of Directors and World Council elected from residents and alumni around the country. This enabled the national board to recruit experienced outside directors to compliment the residents and alumni making up the democratic self-run organization.
In 1999, Oxford House held its first annual World Convention. This brought members and alumni from all over the country together to enjoy fellowship and learn more about Oxford House.
In 2011, Oxford House was listed on the National Registry of Evidence-based Programs and Practices – an honor to the men and women who for 36 years had demonstrated that living in a structured Oxford House greatly increases the odds for achieving long-term sobriety.
"Research on Oxford House found that people who enter recovery housing—when compared to people returning to their community directly after treatment—typically have decreased rates of substance use and incarceration as well as increased rates of employment."
SAMHSA - Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
In 2013, an Oxford House resident from NJ created oxfordvacancies.com. The website is a vacancy locator that keeps its information up to date in an automated fashion by sending text messages to all of the houses asking them how many openings they have.
In 2014, Oxford House's founder Paul Molloy reached out to the resident and asked them if they could work with the states to deploy the system nationwide. This system enables prospective members to find openings quickly and apply to houses.
In the early 1970s, J. Paul Molloy was a young lawyer on Capitol Hill who had a key role in drafting legislation that created Amtrak and other federal programs. He was also an alcoholic whose drinking would eventually cost him his job, his family and his home.
For a couple of months in 1975, he found himself living on the streets and begging strangers for money before he entered a rehabilitation program. He moved to a county-run halfway house in Silver Spring, MD, to recover but soon learned that the facility was about to close.
Instead of being left to their own fates, Mr. Molloy and other residents decided to take over the house themselves, paying the expenses and utilities, cooking the meals and keeping watch over one another’s path to recovery.
They called their experiment in group living and joint sobriety Oxford House. It was the first step in a nationwide movement, now almost 50 years old, that has been credited with helping thousands of people overcome addiction and lead productive lives.
Something about the simplicity of the program seemed to work. Democratically run, self-supporting houses where anyone that uses drugs or alcohol is expelled.
Mr. Molloy and the other residents devised the basic rules of self-government that have shaped Oxford House ever since. First, all decisions would be made democratically, with a group vote. Second, every resident would contribute equally to the expenses and household duties. And, most important, anyone using drugs or alcohol would be expelled.
Another key element of the plan was that there was no deadline for moving out: People could live in an Oxford House as long as they wanted, if they followed the rules.
In the 1980s, the Oxford House idea expanded to other states. It received a boost after Mr. Molloy successfully lobbied for passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which established a fund to help provide start-up loans for groups opening residential recovery locations like those of Oxford House.
A long-running study by Chicago’s DePaul University shows that people completing one year of residency maintain a sobriety rate as high as 80 percent.
When some communities tried to keep Oxford House from renting in their neighborhoods, Mr. Molloy and his lawyers went to court. Oxford House won a U.S. Supreme Court victory in 1995 against the city of Edmonds, Wash., on grounds that the city’s efforts to block the group home violated provisions of the Fair Housing Act.
Today Oxford House has more than 20,000 residents at more than 3,500 homes across 47 states and several foreign countries. Hundreds of thousands of people have been through the program.
* Excerpted from The Washington Post article dated June 16, 2022
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