Chattanooga Recovery Provider Opens 16 Sober Living Apartments

The Council for Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services opened 16 sober living apartments on its Chattanooga campus, the nonprofit announced Oct. 31, expanding its recovery housing from 24 apartments to 40. The two-story building sits on the CADAS campus and is reserved for people leaving substance use disorder treatment who are working toward independent living.

The units were financed and supported through a partnership that included the Chattanooga Housing Authority, Hamilton County Government, RockPoint Bank and the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, according to the agency. The housing authority will offer vouchers for the apartments, which CADAS describes as targeting low-income residents in early recovery.

What the building offers beyond a roof

Each apartment has its own exterior entrance, an open floor plan and furnishings, and residents are expected to stay sober, hold a job, follow community guidelines and stay accountable to the recovery community. CADAS framed those conditions as the program rather than house rules: the point is to give people a place where routines, work and relationships can be rebuilt while they are still close to clinical support.

"These projects are more than bricks and mortar; they represent our commitment to creating a healthier, more hopeful future for our community," said Dr. Paul Fuchcar, CADAS executive director. He described the opening as an answer to what happens after treatment ends, when the choice can come down to returning to an environment where drugs are present or becoming homeless.

The nonprofit said the 16 units were developed through its Project Homecoming initiative, which handled the conversion of the new apartments into furnished homes. CADAS was founded in 1964 and runs detoxification, residential treatment, outpatient care, medication-assisted treatment, adolescent services, transitional housing and sober living across Chattanooga and southeast Tennessee.

Why recovery housing is treated as treatment infrastructure

Sober living occupies a strange place in the addiction care system: it is housing, not a licensed level of care, yet it is frequently the difference between someone staying in recovery and cycling back into detox. Programs that place people in stable, substance-free housing after residential treatment can keep them connected to outpatient services and medication while they rebuild income and routine.

That is why the funding partners matter as much as the building. A housing authority voucher makes a unit affordable to someone with no savings and a recent gap in employment; county and state behavioral health money covers the support structure around it. The arrangement also reflects how recovery housing is typically financed in Tennessee and most other states — not through a single grant program but through a stack of housing, criminal justice and behavioral health funding streams that have to be assembled project by project.

It is slow work. CADAS broke ground on these 16 apartments in March 2025, roughly 19 months before residents could move in.

Sixteen more units against a county count that has not turned

Hamilton County recorded 89 overdose deaths through September of this year and 141 in all of last year, according to a county midyear report, with fentanyl involved in about six of every ten deaths counted so far in 2026. Demand for post-treatment housing scales with those numbers, and 16 apartments — however welcome — is a fraction of what a county of Chattanooga's size generates in a year.

Fuchcar's framing acknowledged the scale problem indirectly. He described the apartments as 16 additional opportunities, not as a solution to housing instability among people leaving treatment.

The timing also lands in a hard stretch for providers who run the levels of care that feed recovery housing. This fall alone, a Portland treatment center for mothers closed its residential beds, a 10-bed detox program in Bangor shut down, and the Wabanaki public health agency cut nearly a fifth of its workforce amid a detox deficit — closures that operators attributed in large part to reimbursement rates that do not cover the cost of care. Recovery housing built on vouchers and public partnerships is exposed to the same pressure, since the rental subsidy and the support services come from different funders with different renewal cycles.

What to watch

The next question for the project is not construction but occupancy and retention: how quickly the 16 units fill, how many residents stay employed and housed through the first year, and whether the voucher pipeline keeps pace with turnover. CADAS said residents are expected to maintain sobriety and employment and to remain accountable to the recovery community, but the nonprofit did not release outcome targets or reporting commitments with the announcement.

For people considering recovery housing, the practical questions are the ones this project illustrates: whether the unit is affordable without income, whether clinical and medication services are nearby, and whether the operator has a written set of expectations. Our guides on long-term residential care and substance use disorder cover those decisions, and our October report on Hamilton County's overdose count and naloxone outreach has the local data behind this story.