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Giving Alcoholics A Home Helps Them Manage Their Addiction

 

Alan Surratt is a bearded, balding man of average height with a large middle. On this warm spring day he’s showing me his studio apartment at 1811 Eastlake in Seattle.  He wears a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. He’s an alcoholic and he’s drunk. His life and career in academia began to unravel decades ago. Things got really bad when his third marriage ended.

“I left my wife for another woman. That’s the official reason. The primary reason is I left her for my original love, alcohol.”

 

Alcohol has such a firm hold over Surratt that he doesn’t have hangovers anymore, “I have withdrawals. I feel them, it hurts. I have some nasty withdrawals. And I don’t like that at all,” he says in a whispered growl.

 

Surratt is one of the 74 people who live at 1811 Eastlake. The blue-grey four story building is tucked into the concrete armpit of I-5 and the Denny overpass. To get a place here you have to be homeless and you must be addicted to alcohol. Most chronic alcoholics are middle age men and the population at 1811 reflects that. Surratt is 55 years old and he’s a binge drinker.

 

“Right now as we’re talking I’m in the midst of a binge. It’s like the snake in the box thing. You have to open up that damn box to see if the snake is still there, and I do that,” says Sutratt.

 

Before 1811 Eastlake existed Bill Hobson thought, “These folks are never going to get sober. What are we going to do with them?”

 

Hobson is the head of DESC, the non-profit that oversees 1811 Eastlake. “If you are over 45 years of age, if you have a minimum of 15 years of street alcohol addiction history under your belt and you have six or more failed attempts of treatment, you have a less than four percent chance of getting sober for the remainder of your life,”  says Hobson.

 

The odds of someone like Surratt breaking alcohol’s steel grip are slim.

 

“And do we want to continue to see them oscillate endlessly between jails and emergency departments eating up public revenue resources? Or should we be thinking about something different?” is what Hobson asked when he and other leaders in Seattle’s social services community came up with the concept of Housing First for high needs populations more than 20 years ago.

 

If removing alcohol wasn't realistic, Hobson thought the thing that could be fixed was housing. Taking the chaos of homelessness from the equation. What would happen if that stress and uncertainty was eliminated and this population was allowed to drink as much as it wanted?

 

When the first group of alcoholics moved into 1811 Eastlake, “There was a 30% reduction in alcohol consumption,” says Hobson.

 

You see, when alcoholics are living on the streets they buy their beverage of choice, and they drink it immediately. They know their friends will want to share it with them, or a police officer will confiscate it and make them pour it out.

 

Hobson says all of this changes once someone has a home, “Once you live in a housing project, you can put you bottle on the shelf or the beer in the fridge and consume at your leisure. We’re convinced that was the principal reason for the reduction.”

 

Just to be clear, alcohol still has a tight grip on people like Surratt, but researchers at the University of Washington say the residents at 1811 Eastlake have gone from having  20 drinks a day to about 12. And for Surratt and others who need extra help, 1811 has something called an alcohol management program; a certain number of drinks, usually six, are handed out on a schedule at the front desk.

 

“I like just having that six a day,” says Surratt.

 

This prevents residents from wandering the streets in search of beer and liquor. It keeps them out of trouble. Studies out of the University of Washington show that when this population makes fewer visits to jails and emergency rooms, it ends up saving Seattle and King County more than $4 million a year.

For a handful of the residents, having a stable, safe, home that didn’t ask them to kick their habit, didn’t just result in them tapering off, it  jolted them awake. They made the decision on their own to get completely sober.

 

Rodger Field is one of these people. A switch flipped inside of him once he had his own apartment with a door he could lock. A few years ago he was a mess.

 

“I drank myself out of the Air Force in four months,” recalls Field.

 

Field had a wife, stepkids, a house, a car, a decent job. He lost everything because of his drinking. He lived on the streets of Seattle for years, making lots of trips to Harborview’s emergency room.

 

When Field got a place at 1811 Eastlake he didn’t remember anything about what his first four months here were like. But at some point, “In March of 2010 I had my last drink. The epiphany was that it wasn’t working for me. It wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do,” says Field.

 

Field is one of only about a dozen people who have been able to do this since 1811 opened in 2005. It’s a rare achievement. He’s one of the four percent.

 

Field is welcome to stay at 1811 for as long as he wants. He has counselors and social workers available 24 hours a day to support him. He has a job cold-calling people and asking for donations for the non-profit Sight Connections For The Blind. His mind is busy. He wants to make up for lost time and he’d like to earn more money.

 

“I wouldn’t mind a bookkeeping job, or a library job. I would able to be a perfectionist without driving somebody up a wall,” Field says.

 

He is learning how to manage his emotions. “I found out that it actually feels better to smile than to fly off the handle. Success!”

 

Field is proud of the fact he owns a TV, a computer and an I-Pod. He’s not bragging. The presence of these devices in his personal space is a reminder that he is still sober. Back when he blindly wandered Seattle’s streets he would have sold everything to buy the next drink.

 

By watching people like Field and other residents who have cut back on the bottle, Noah Fay, 1811’s project manager, is learning a lot about how positive change happens.

 

“We need to let our own client’s motivations be what drives outcomes and it’s our job to help steer them in the right direction,” says Fay.

 

Based on what Fay sees, he says that forcing people to quit drinking just doesn’t work. “No one likes to be told what to do.”

 

According to Fay, lasting change only sticks when it’s completely self motivated.

 

“Being told what to do puts people on the defensive and doesn’t get to the root, underlying motivation that drives change. People can get better but you have to allow them the room to do it themselves.”

 

Surratt has tried to get sober many times without much success. But even when he stumbles around intoxicated, just knowing that sobriety is an option is a comfort to him.

 

“I like the idea of waking up and there is a chance I will spend the day sober. I like that it’s offered,” says Surratt.

 

As bad as he might be, Surratt is convinced he’d be a lot worse if not for this place.

 

“Hell, for all I know, the reason I’m alive is this place.”

 

For now, Surratt has no plans to quit drinking.

Jennifer Wing is a former KNKX reporter and producer who worked on the show Sound Effect and Transmission podcast.