Wayfinder Recovery Services is once again expanding its Lowertown sober-living facility, growing from 46 beds to 66. The nonprofit's executive director says the growth still won't be enough to clear a waitlist that keeps refilling as fast as beds open.
Wayfinder Recovery Services will open 20 additional sober-living beds at its Lowertown facility over the next four months, bringing its total capacity to 66 beds, executive director Donna Wysocki said Tuesday. The expansion comes less than two years after the nonprofit added 14 beds to reach its current 46, an increase Wysocki said has still not kept pace with demand.
“We keep expanding and we keep filling every bed within days,” Wysocki said. “I used to think we’d eventually build our way to a waitlist we could live with. I don’t think that’s how this works anymore.” Wayfinder’s waitlist has held between 15 and 25 names for most of the past year, she said, even after the last round of new beds came online.
A waitlist that will not shrink
Deacon Farrow, a 34-year-old Foundry Row warehouse worker who has been on Wayfinder’s sober-living waitlist for six weeks, said he has been staying with his sister in the meantime while trying to stay clean without a structured program around him. “I know exactly what happens to me if I go back to my old apartment,” Farrow said. “I’ve told them I’ll take whatever bed opens up first, because every week I wait is a week I’m white-knuckling it on my own.”
Wysocki said Farrow’s situation is typical of who fills the waitlist: people who have already completed detox or an outpatient program and are ready for structured housing, but who do not have a crisis acute enough to jump ahead of others waiting. “We used to reserve some flexibility for people in genuinely dangerous housing situations,” she said. “Now almost everyone on the list would qualify as urgent by the standards we used three years ago.”
We keep expanding and we keep filling every bed within days. I used to think we’d eventually build our way to a waitlist we could live with. I don’t think that’s how this works anymore.
Donna Wysocki, Executive Director, Wayfinder Recovery Services
Funding pieced together again
The new beds are funded through a combination of a renewed state recovery-housing grant, a Wentworth County allocation and a private foundation gift Wysocki declined to detail further, saying the funder preferred to remain unnamed. She said the arrangement, spread across three separate sources, mirrors how Wayfinder financed its last expansion and reflects a funding landscape she described as reliable in aggregate but unpredictable year to year.
“None of these three funders has committed to renewing next year,” Wysocki said. “So every time we expand, we’re also quietly hoping the next round of beds doesn’t become the round we can’t afford to keep open.” She said Wayfinder’s annual operating budget for sober-living services has grown from roughly $1.4 million three years ago to just over $2.6 million with the new beds included.
A Lowertown council member weighs in
City Council Member Terrence Boudreaux, who represents Lowertown, where Wayfinder’s facility sits, said he has fielded a steady stream of calls from constituents asking how to get a family member on the waitlist. “I don’t think people outside Lowertown always understand how central this building has become to the neighborhood,” Boudreaux said. “It’s not an abstract service. It’s the place half my constituents know someone who’s stayed there.”
Boudreaux said he supports continued city investment in the facility but cautioned that expansion alone will not solve the underlying math. “You can build sixty-six beds, then eighty, then a hundred, and if the number of people who need a bed keeps growing at the same pace, you’re still running in place,” he said. “At some point we have to talk about why so many people in this neighborhood are getting to the point of needing one in the first place.”
Wysocki said she shares that concern but does not see it as a reason to delay expansion. Overdose deaths in Wentworth County have fallen for three straight years, a trend she said is partly attributable to exactly this kind of housing capacity coming online, even as the underlying need remains stubbornly high.
“I’d love to be out of the expansion business,” she said. “But I’m not going to stop building beds because the bigger problem hasn’t been solved. Somebody still has to answer the phone when Deacon Farrow calls asking if anything opened up.”
Construction begins next month
Wysocki said Wayfinder will convert an adjacent building it purchased last year, formerly a small warehouse used for furniture storage, into the new wing of beds, with construction beginning next month and an expected opening in the early winter. She said the organization is also adding two additional case managers to handle the larger resident population, a ratio she said the nonprofit tracks closely after past growth periods left staff stretched thin.
“We learned the hard way that adding beds without adding staff just moves the bottleneck,” Wysocki said. “A bed doesn’t help somebody stay sober by itself. It’s the case manager checking in every morning who actually makes the difference.”
Farrow said he plans to keep calling the intake line weekly in the meantime. “I’m not going to pretend I have a lot of patience left,” he said. “But I’d rather wait for the right kind of help than take a shortcut that doesn’t actually work.”