Raleigh Recovery Program to Open 17 Apartments for Mothers and Their Children

Healing Transitions, a substance use recovery program in Wake County, North Carolina, will open a 17-unit apartment complex early next year for women who have completed its residential program and need somewhere to live with their children. The building sits on the organization's women's campus near Raleigh-Durham International Airport and includes two- and four-bedroom apartments, a communal kitchen and a courtyard, all of it reserved for graduates of a program that has been operating in Raleigh for 25 years.

The organization has raised 88 percent of a $14 million capital campaign goal to pay for it, according to North Carolina Health News, which reported the project October 28.

What the building is actually solving

The stated problem is not sobriety. It is the step immediately after treatment, when a woman is working, attending recovery meetings and trying to regain custody of children, and the three things need to happen in three different places.

Lela Brantley knows the arithmetic. Homeless for four years and having lost custody of her children — now 21, 8 and 6 — she stopped using substances, moved into a recovery center with her younger children and secured a Section 8 housing voucher. Each time, the voucher expired before an apartment came open. "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," she told the outlet. She now works at Healing Transitions as a recovery engagement specialist.

Tracy Freeman-Hines, the organization's director of recovery, graduated from the program in 2013 and moved into recovery housing afterward. Staying connected to the community that had anchored her recovery meant three buses each way, and the recovery housing she could get did not allow her children to live with her.

That is the design argument for putting the apartments on the campus rather than across town: the peer network that carried someone through treatment stays within walking distance at the moment it is most likely to be tested.

A state count that is already out of date

No one can produce a current tally of recovery housing in North Carolina. The most cited figure comes from a 2022 study by the National Study of Treatment and Addiction Recovery Residences, which identified 345 recovery residences in the state — 3.36 houses per 100,000 residents — ranking North Carolina 22nd nationally. Oxford House, one of the largest peer-run networks, reported operating 320 houses statewide as of February 2025, averaging eight beds each, for more than 2,500 beds.

Both numbers predate most of the opioid settlement money that has reached North Carolina since 2023. According to the state's settlement tracker, 19 counties or municipalities have now reported spending settlement funds on recovery housing, a category that did not exist in the 2022 count and that will not appear in a national residence survey until the next one is fielded.

That gap between a 2022 baseline and 2026 spending is the transparency problem in the middle of the recovery housing boom: money is moving, buildings are opening, and the only statewide inventory anyone can quote is four years old.

The rural version of the same problem

Jeff Walker, 49, is director of programming at Wilkes Recovery Revolution in Wilkesboro, which runs four recovery houses serving as many as 43 people. He spent about 25 years cycling through courts, jails and prison before beginning his recovery behind bars, and when he was released in 2016 he had no family left in the area and nowhere to go.

He told North Carolina Health News the program could fill ten buildings at current demand. The constraint is not referral: it is location and transport. The organization runs three vans from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily for residents, because a rural county without bus service turns a ten-mile move into a logistics problem, and the exit problem is worse than the entry problem — people finish the program, save money, work, and then cannot find a landlord who will rent to someone with a felony record.

Zoning is the other gate. When Wilkes Recovery Revolution sought to have a property rezoned for a recovery house, the county took three town hall meetings. Each one drew more people than the room held; at the last, according to Walker, people were standing outside. He now spends much of his day talking to landlords and neighbors, and tells them their houses are less likely to be broken into when recovery houses are nearby. A woman who spoke against the rezoning at that meeting called two years later to apologize and has bought Christmas presents for residents every year since.

An address as a clinical variable

The economics of the transition are unforgiving in Wake County, where Brantley said the cheapest one-bedroom she could find in Raleigh ran about $1,500 a month. Recovery advocates describe housing as a core component of long-term recovery rather than an aftercare amenity, and the long-term residential and residential treatment levels of care are built on the same premise: the environment is part of the treatment.

Chris Budnick, Healing Transitions' executive director, put the failure mode in systems terms at the project's groundbreaking this spring. When someone who has been through treatment relapses, "society tends to look at the individual and say it didn't work," he said. "We failed to look at not providing an adequate dose and duration of treatment, recovery management and recovery supports."

Seventeen apartments will not change a statewide shortage. What the project tests is whether the peer recovery relationships built during residential treatment can survive the move into independent housing — and whether a mother who has done everything the system asked of her ends up with a lease instead of another waitlist.