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NEW BEDFORD — City officials achieved a minor victory in their push to enforce building codes in sober houses.
A Southeast Housing Court judge on Friday issued an injunction ordering the operator of a sober house at 7 Plymouth St. to relocate three of the building’s six residents and to correct several ongoing code violations at the property.
The city has cited the property for unpermitted construction work, running a rooming house without a permit, failing to install fire sprinklers, and failing to make the property accessible.
The property’s owner, Caezar D’Amante, told the court he was doing his best to bring the property up to code. But Judge Donna Salvidio pointed out that the city cited him more than a month ago, and D’Amante only started to address the violations in the week leading up to Friday’s hearing. More unpermitted work has continued even after D’Amante was cited, officials said.
The injunction is the latest incremental development in a broader enforcement drive. The city has brought at least one other sober house to court this year for similar violations. And in June, officials sent letters to more than a dozen properties offering addiction recovery services, telling them they need a rooming house license.
The effort has been going on since at least January, according to internal city emails obtained by The Light. A copy of Mayor Jon Mitchell’s calendar obtained by The Light also shows he held several meetings about sober houses throughout the spring.
City officials say they’re just enforcing the law.
“To be clear, our intention is not to investigate sober houses, but make sure that the list of rooming houses includes those that are characterized as ‘sober houses,’” Mitchell wrote in an email to other city officials in January. “It’s not evident why those were left off the list, but there is no reason to believe that they don’t pose the same risks to public safety and tenant welfare as other rooming houses.”
What’s a sober house?
Sober houses, also known as sober homes, are shared living spaces for people in recovery from addiction. They aren’t treatment centers — instead, they serve as an intermediate step between treatment and independent living.
Recovery advocates say the ideal sober house provides a stable, drug-free environment where people can live for a few months while they get back on their feet. But some sober houses are more sober than others, recovery advocates say, and the worst ones can be hotspots for relapses and overdoses.
Sober housing is not a regulated industry, though operators can get a voluntary certification from the Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing, a nonprofit organization that works under contract with the state to maintain standards at sober houses. Ten properties in New Bedford have a MASH certification, out of at least 19 sober houses in the city.
Still, some sober house operators say they are being unfairly targeted.
“It’s obvious that New Bedford does not want any sober homes in the community,” D’Amante said at his court hearing on Friday.
The city has taken similar action against a sober house at 52 Ash St., owned by Calderia LLC. The company’s lawyer has filed a counterclaim in that case, saying that the city is illegally discriminating against people with substance use disorders by taking an unusually aggressive code enforcement approach. In the meantime, the company has agreed to limit the property’s occupancy to five residents while it addresses other code violations.
In June, the city sent letters to 20 properties that offer addiction recovery services, requiring them to register as rooming houses. The city has received a range of responses to those letters, said city spokesperson Jonathan Darling.
“Some have applied for licenses, some are communicating with City Hall through their attorneys, some are adamant they are not lodging houses, and some have simply not gotten back to us,” Darling said in an email.
Some sober house operators also received letters saying that rooming house regulations require them to install fire sprinklers, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Those notices laid out a one-year timeline for installing sprinklers. Darling did not have a tally of properties that had responded to the sprinkler letters.
The case against 7 Plymouth St.
The city tried to inspect the Plymouth Street sober house in May, after receiving anonymous complaints that the single-family home was being used as a “boarding house and/or sober living facility,” according to court filings. D’Amante didn’t show up for the inspection, so the city sent him a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he stop using the property until it was inspected and he got the proper permits.
“He ignored that,” Assistant City Solicitor Owen Murphy told the court on Friday.
About 100 people attended a Ward 5 neighborhood meeting on sober houses in June, where many residents called on the city to crack down on the unregulated properties. Officials at the meeting said anti-discrimination laws limited what they could do.
Some residents were deeply concerned that D’Amante and one other resident of the property are registered sex offenders. D’Amante was convicted of “dissemination of matter harmful to minors” in 2012 and “trafficking of persons for sexual servitude” in 2016, his public registration shows.
“Is it a sober house or a registered sex offender house?” one resident asked with exasperation.
Officials went back to Plymouth Street the next day with a warrant to inspect the property. They found seven bedrooms with a total of 12 beds in the house, according to court filings. Two of the bedrooms were added by converting the first-floor dining room and sitting area, without the necessary building permits. Coin-operated laundry machines had been installed in the basement without the necessary electrical and plumbing permits.
D’Amante also didn’t get a change-of-use permit to convert the single-family home into a sober house, the filings say.
Code enforcement officials categorize sober houses as rooming houses, and any rooming house with more than five occupants is required to install fire sprinklers. The Plymouth Street sober house has six occupants including D’Amante, and no sprinkler system, so it was cited for that. The property also failed to meet certain accessibility requirements for “transient lodging facilities,” triggering another set of citations.
City inspector Matthew Silva said he stopped contractors from doing more unpermitted construction work at the property on Thursday, and one of his colleagues had spotted unpermitted plumbing work taking place just hours before the hearing began on Friday.
D’Amante, wearing a white T-shirt and ripped jeans, was not represented by a lawyer. He said this was his first sober house and he thought that the property was “all set” because it had been certified by the Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing, a nonprofit organization that issues voluntary certifications to sober houses that meet certain standards.
The sober house owner asked questions and made statements throughout the hearing that seemed to reflect a lack of familiarity with the regulations he was being cited for. But Murphy, the city’s lawyer, said the city had sent D’Amante letters with notice of all the violations and what he needed to do to fix them. The property owner only started applying for permits last week, in a “last-ditch effort” to comply before the hearing, Murphy said.
“It kind of seems like he’s doing whatever he wants,” Murphy said.
Judge Donna Salvidio said she didn’t doubt that D’Amante wanted to be in compliance, but it would be a long process to fix all of the violations.
“You clearly have some homework to do in order to jump through the necessary hoops to get where you need to be,” she told the sober house owner.
The city asked the housing court to order that the property stop operating as a sober house until the violations are fixed. The judge issued an injunction that technically does stop the property from operating as a sober house — but not completely, and not immediately.
The injunction ordered D’Amante to stop all construction work, get all the proper permits, and relocate three of the property’s six occupants in the meantime. That last requirement brings the property into compliance with a city bylaw that limits the number of unrelated people that can live in a single-family home together.
Judge Salvidio said she was concerned about the safety of the property’s occupants because there is no sprinkler system. She added that she was requiring the relocations because D’Amante had not addressed the violations for months, even after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.
“I need to ensure that you are motivated to see this through,” she said.
The city wanted the relocations completed within a week, but the judge set a 30-day timeline.
D’Amante argued that he did not count as an occupant under the state sprinkler law because he was the building’s proprietor, saying the city’s fire chief had told him so. But Judge Salvidio rejected his argument and said it didn’t address the fact that the property is still zoned as a single-family home, where only three unrelated people can live together.
Leaving the courtroom, D’Amante put on a pair of sunglasses and declined to comment.
Email Grace Ferguson at gferguson@newbedfordlight.org
I am curious as to who pays Mr Diamante to house these tenants!?!
I’m a fan of Mr. Damante. Keep fighting brother!
Where should the recovering alcoholics live?
I actually met Mr. D’Amante a few months back. If it wasn’t for him I would have still been in prison. I was able to parole to his house on a grant. I stayed for 3 months and during that time I found a job , saved enough money and was able to get my own place.
I spoke with Mr. D’Amante a couple of months back when I was calling to see if he could help my son that was leaving a detox facility but had no where to go. He reserved a bed for my son and was able to keep him from living in the streets. The city of New Bedford could learn something from people like him.
All I got to say is Caezar D’Amante is really out here in the community who is actually doing something good to help people from being homeless and going back to jail.
Thanks to the Freedom House, I was able to get a second chance at life. Thank you Caezar!
Mr. D’Amante is a great recovery coach and he mentored me. I stayed at the Freedom House for 2 months and I was able to save up enough money for my own apartment. Thank you Caezar!
Caezar helped me get my CDL from Masshire
To all, I thank you for your input and support. It is greatly appreciated by me and the Freedom House team. I will continue working to improve my sober living program to help and to better serve the people in community that are struggling with substance abuse issues. Recovery is Freedom Corporation (Freedom House), is a transformational recovery organization that offers community support to individuals coming out of incarceration and homelessness, guiding them toward healthy and meaningful lives. We are a network of recovery homes that provide safe, stable, structured, and sober living arrangements. We believe in helping those in need of a second chance transition back into the community, while providing a safe space where they can connect with social services, find meaningful employment, and locate long-term housing.
Thank you Caezar for all of your support and coaching.