Raleigh addiction recovery program to open apartments for mothers and children

By Taylor Knopf

Twice, Lela Brantley did everything she was supposed to do and still ended up homeless. 

She stopped using substances. She moved into a recovery center with her small children. She secured a Section 8 affordable housing voucher and got on the waitlist for multiple apartments. Each time the voucher expired before an apartment was available. 

“In my mind, I was doing the right things. I was sober. I was working a full-time job, taking care of my kids, and I still had nowhere safe to go,” Brantley said. 

In December 2024, she had been homeless for four years and lost custody of her children, who are now 21, 8 and 6. Then Brantley arrived at Healing Transitions, a substance use recovery program in Wake County, which Brantley refers to as “the place that saved my life.” 

Now, as a recovery engagement specialist at Healing Transitions, Brantley said she is pleased to see the organization creating apartment-style housing for people like her. Early next year, Healing Transitions will open a 17-unit apartment complex for women who have graduated from the recovery program and need a safe place to live with their children — one that keeps them connected to their recovery community as they transition back into the mainstream. 

The apartment complex is on Healing Transitions women’s campus near the Raleigh-Durham airport and includes two- and four-bedroom apartments, a large kitchen and community space that can be used for group meals, yoga and bonding time. The entire complex is kid-friendly with a courtyard for little ones to play and a slide that runs alongside the stairway. 

“This building and this project is super important to me because it was a big barrier for me and my children to have somewhere safe to live,” Brantley said. “It’s not just this building being somewhere to live, this place is family.”

Healing Transitions has been raising money through a capital campaign to make this project a reality; they are 88 percent of the way to a $14 million goal. Executive Director Chris Budnick said typical addiction recovery systems have not been designed to stay connected with people for the years it takes to build a sustainable life in recovery.

“As a result, when folks who have been to treatment have a relapse, society tends to look at the individual and say it didn’t work,” he told a group gathered at the groundbreaking of the complex this spring. “We failed to look at not providing an adequate dose and duration of treatment, recovery management and recovery supports.”

The kind of long-term housing support Budnick describes is lacking across the state. By various counts, North Carolina doesn’t have enough housing to serve the thousands who are nurturing their recovery. There are also barriers to creating more — from a lack of financial resources to neighbors who don’t want people in recovery living nearby. 

Meanwhile, recovery advocates say housing is an absolutely vital component of long-term addiction recovery. 

Helping mothers in recovery

Women sometimes face tougher challenges in recovery because they often assume greater responsibility for their children than men do, Budnick said. That translates into needing an income and housing options that can accommodate and support more than just themselves. And for many, he said, by the time they reach Healing Transitions, they’ve already lost custody of their children.

“You’re talking about work, taking care of your recovery and reunifying,” he said. “That’s just going to be a lot. They can feel overwhelmed by that.” 

When Tracy Freeman-Hines, who is now director of recovery at Healing Transitions, graduated from the program in 2013, she moved into recovery housing and took three buses back to Healing Transitions to stay connected with her recovery support community. Additionally, her recovery housing arrangement didn’t allow for her children to live with her.

“So every day I was working to stay sober, rebuild my life and reconnect with my children. But those parts of my life are happening in three separate places,” she told a crowd gathered at the groundbreaking event for the apartment complex. 

“When I look back, I can clearly see how much stronger that journey could have possibly been if two things had been able to happen at the same time: staying close to my recovery community that gave me my foundation, and having my children living under my roof.”

Few and far between

It’s difficult to obtain a complete, current count of recovery housing in the state. A 2022 study by the National Study of Treatment & Addiction Recovery Residences identified 345 recovery residences — 3.36 houses per 100,000 population — in North Carolina, ranking the state 22nd in the nation for recovery housing.

Oxford House, one of the largest networks of peer-run recovery homes, reported operating 320 houses statewide as of February 2025, with an average of eight beds per house, totaling more than 2,500 beds.

But the 2022 study is likely an underestimate now. It doesn’t include some of the newer recovery housing projects that were started with opioid settlement funds, which started flowing in 2023. So far, 19 counties or municipalities have reported using settlement funds for recovery housing initiatives, according to the state’s settlement tracker. 

The study also missed four recovery houses operated by Wilkes Recovery Revolution in Wilkesboro. Jeff Walker, 49, is director of programming at Wilkes Recovery Revolution, and the housing issue is personal for him. 

Walker spent about 25 years cycling through courts, jails and prison because of substance use, and he began his recovery from substances behind bars. When he was released in 2016, he had nowhere to go: His parents had died, and he had no family in the area. Ultimately, he ended up being the second person to live in the program’s transitional housing for men.

Wilkes Recovery Revolution serves as many as 43 people in its four homes, but Walker said there’s so much demand, they could fill 10 buildings.

“So when trying to find transitional housing, you have to be real intentional on location, which makes it even more challenging in rural communities because we don’t have any transportation service,” he said. 

Wilkes Recovery Revolutions runs three vans for its program residents from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day. When people are ready to graduate from the program and move into their own housing, however, the logistics get even more challenging.

“Second-chance housing has always been far and few and in between,” he said. “They’ll come through our program, and they’ll thrive, and they’ll save their money, and they’ll work, and they’ll go through their treatment plan and they’ll go to their meetings. Then when they try to move out, it’s hard to find a place to go. It’s just there’s no housing in our community, especially for people who are felons.”

Walker said participants can live in the transitional housing program for a year, and staff start looking for someone’s next place to live after about three months. Walker said he’s been intentional about building relationships with landlords in the community. 

Taking the next step

Moving out of recovery housing can be just as challenging in Wake County, where there’s not much affordable housing.

Healing Transitions has been open for 25 years, and Budnick said that helping people stop using substances and land their first job no longer feels like enough. The missing piece is what comes after.

“Once you’ve gotten stable in your recovery, what’s the opportunity for you to move into your own type of housing?” he said. “It’s really challenging to find affordable housing options.”

Budnick said there are some good recovery housing options in Wake County, including Passage Home and Oxford House, but a real barrier is the step after that. He said Healing Transitions is starting to look at what the organization can do to support people getting into their own housing.

“At some point, you want to get to a place where it’s like, ‘All right, I’ve lived with people for a few years, and I’m ready to have my own space,’” Budnick said. “But … criminal background, income, affordability — all those things can pose barriers.”

Brantley said the cheapest place she could find in Raleigh, even a one-bedroom apartment, was about $1,500 a month. 

“If we’re doing everything possible that we can to better ourselves and do the right thing, and we still have nowhere to live, that’s huge,” she said. “It has taken me back out so many times.”

She said she has seen other people’s recovery veer off track when they couldn’t find safe housing.

Brantley found a way through, but the days were grueling. After completing the program at Healing Transitions, she moved into an Oxford House and worked two full-time jobs to save for a deposit. She didn’t have her children back yet and was doing everything in her power to make that happen.

Not in my backyard 

Stigma around recovery housing is another barrier in the city and in rural communities, where people sometimes object to having recovery housing nearby.

“There’s always going to be that stigma until people are educated around it,” Brantley said. Healing Transitions regularly gives tours to community members, including local officials and law enforcement.

In rural communities, the stigma can run deeper, Walker said.

“I spend most of my day now advocating, trying to speak up, speak out and speak well,” he said. 

That means talking with landlords and neighbors about why people in recovery need a chance at housing. He said Wilkes County has come a long way, but opening new program housing is still an uphill battle. 

When Wilkes Recovery Revolution tried to get a property zoned for a recovery house, it took three town hall meetings. Each time, so many people showed up to oppose it that the crowd was too big for the room, so the next meeting moved to a larger space, Walker said. At the last one, he said there were still people standing outside.

Walker said he tries to explain to concerned neighbors that their houses are less likely to get broken into when there are more recovery houses around. 

“I’ve never seen anybody sober really steal anything,” he said. “They’re held more accountable at a transitional house than on your neighborhood street.”

Over time, he’s seen people change. A neighbor who was one of the loudest oppositional voices at the town hall meeting called Wilkes Recovery Revolution two years later and apologized. Walker said the woman offered to buy Christmas presents for the program residents, and she continues to do so every year. 

“Some people have to see it,” he said.

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