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As Athens looks to regulate recovery homes, it must navigate anti-discrimination laws

By: David Forster
Posted on: Tuesday, February 17, 2026

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — The Athens Planning Commission is looking to develop some zoning rules to regulate the location of recovery homes in the city.

This comes as some residents have complained about two recovery homes that have been the subject of several police calls over the past few months.

The homes are operated by a branch of Nex Level Behavioral Health and Addiction Services, a Columbus company.

Nex Level had been operating the homes for months without registering with the state and beginning the process of getting the homes accredited, which is required by law.

City officials raised this issue with the state Department of Behavioral Health, which regulates recovery homes. The department sent Nex Level a letter on Feb. 5 giving it 60 days to comply with the requirements.

Two days later, Nex Level submitted the required registration forms. It must now begin the process of getting the homes accredited. This involves making sure the homes are meeting certain standards for staffing, supervision and support services.

Joi Jones, the executive director of Nex Level, said she simply forgot to register the homes when she opened them.

“We’re trying to do everything right,” Jones said. “I just totally forgot that I had to do that.”

Jones said she has moved the residents out of the homes, which she said are now sitting vacant as she begins the accreditation process.

Now that the homes are registered with the state, they can legally be reoccupied while the accreditation process is underway.

Jones said she also was aware of complaints made by residents at a recent City Council meeting that the recovery homes were not serving local people but instead people from the Columbus area.

She said she brought people down from Columbus because she had no more space there to house them. Moving forward, she said, she plans to only place people from Athens and the surrounding area in the homes.

One of the police calls involved a resident of one of the homes who said her boyfriend had been kicked out of the house because he was drunk and he was trying to break back in.

Police found that the man had a warrant out for his arrest and took him into custody.

Jones said she was unaware of the warrant. She said Nex Level does not do background checks on its residents.

“We didn’t know that his intentions were to hide out in a sober house,” she said.

Other police calls involved residents who were drunk or had overdosed.

Recovery homes must meet certain standards

Recovery homes are intended to provide a supportive environment to people with a history of drug and alcohol use. They can operate at one of four levels, as defined by the National Alliance for Recovery Residences.

Moving up the levels comes with increasing requirements for staffing, supervision and support services for the residents.

Ohio Recovery Housing, which provides accreditation for most of the recovery homes in Ohio, has a 77-page manual of operating standards that cover all levels.

Nex Level has registered its Athens homes as level two. These homes are run primarily by the residents themselves, who provide peer support to one another and are expected to enforce the rules together. At least one paid staff person is required to check in with residents at least once a day, respond to incidents, make sure the homes are alcohol and drug free, and monitor residents for signs of relapsing.

Recovery homes must be recertified every two years, a process that includes making sure the homes are complying with the accreditation standards. Ohio Recovery Housing does not inspect the homes it certifies in between these biennial recertifications, but it is looking to change that. 

“We’re actually hiring some additional staff so that we can go out and do support visits,” said Executive Director Danielle Gray. “So that would be we randomly select properties across the state and then make a visit and show up and see how things are going and check things out. And if we discover that there are issues that need to be corrected, we would work with that operator to make sure that those items were corrected.”

Residents of recovery homes may be charged rent or the operator may cover the rent or a portion of it. Recovery housing is not eligible for reimbursement under Medicaid or private insurance, Gray said. Some operators may receive funding through their local alcohol, drug addiction and mental health services board, but these funds are limited.

The bottom line is recovery homes are not a big profit center. “Funding specific for recovery housing is extremely limited,” Gray said.

Instead, where recovery home operators typically make their money is through treatment facilities they operate for people who are in recovery or need help with mental health issues. These facilities offer counseling, therapy, treatment, life and job skills training and other services that may be eligible for government funding through programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

Nex Level operates a treatment facility just outside Athens, where residents of its recovery homes spent their days, Jones said.

“That’s where they go 9 to 5, every day,” she said.

Operators of treatment facilities are allowed to operate recovery homes as well.

“That is something that we’re definitely seeing is maybe a treatment provider opening up a recovery home,” Gray said. “They might use those funds to support the work of the recovery home. … They’re not billing for recovery housing, but they are using the funds that they get from other clinical treatment services to support the home.”

These operators cannot, however, require residents of their homes to also use their treatment facilities or offer any inducements, such as free or discounted rent, to encourage residents to do so. This violates federal law.

Local regulations may violate anti-discrimination laws

Regulations for recovery homes are a work in progress. In response to the growing number of homes in Ohio and concerns raised about how they are run, the legislature has been tightening the regulations. For example, the requirement that recovery homes be either certified by the state or accredited by an organization approved by the state took effect at the start of last year.

Local governments are also taking a stab at their own regulations, often in response to resident complaints.

The Athens Planning Commission is looking to develop some zoning rules that may restrict where recovery homes can be located and how close one home can be from another. The commission is expected to take up some draft language for these rules at its meeting Wednesday.

Efforts to regulate recovery homes locally could run into some legal restrictions, however. A little over a year ago, the U.S. Department of Justice weighed in on a lawsuit by a Lawrence County recovery home operator challenging regulations adopted by Coal Grove Village Council.

The department said the federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discriminating against people in addiction recovery and that the act applies to local governments. This means local governments may run into legal problems if they treat recovery homes differently than they treat other kinds of housing.

In the Coal Grove case, the council adopted requirements for recovery homes that did not apply to other types of housing. For example, recovery homes were required to register with the village, get certain permits and submit to local inspections.

“Each ordinance identifies homes serving people with disabilities … and subjects them to additional, onerous requirements that do not apply to similarly situated housing for persons without disabilities. Accordingly … these ordinances are facially discriminatory,” the Justice Department wrote in a statement filed with the court.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a joint statement in 2016 that gives several examples of zoning restrictions that could run afoul of the Fair Housing Act.

For example, prohibiting recovery homes from locating in single-family neighborhoods would be a violation, according to the document. If there are restrictions on the number of unrelated people who can live in a home and the local government refuses to grant a waiver for residents of recovery homes, this could be a violation.

Spacing requirements, which the Athens Planning Commission is considering, may also be illegal, according to the document. If the locality has a limit on the number of unrelated people who can live in a home, which Athens does, and a recovery home does not go over this limit, a spacing requirement for recovery homes would violate the act.

A locality may be able to impose spacing requirements on recovery homes that house more than the limit on unrelated people under a special waiver, but if this is challenged, it will be up to a court to decide if it’s legal.

“Some courts … have found that spacing requirements violate the Fair Housing Act because they deny persons with disabilities an equal opportunity to choose where they will live,” the document states. “Because an across-the-board spacing requirement may discriminate against persons with disabilities in some residential areas, any standards that state or local governments adopt should evaluate the location of group homes for persons with disabilities on a case-by-case basis.”