Sunshine Sober Living provides structured mens sober living for Sherman Oaks referrals from its Tarzana house on Donna Avenue, twelve to eighteen minutes west on US-101. Men aged 21 and older hold down jobs, attend outpatient care and answer to each other under posted house rules. Admissions answers on 866-216-9789.
A man leaving treatment usually needs two things at once: somewhere the drinking cannot follow him, and a reason to be awake at six. The Tarzana house supplies both, and it sits close enough that a sponsor, a job and a family in Sherman Oaks all stay within reach. The wider area overview covers the neighbourhood in full.
Sunshine has been family-owned since 2019. Elliot Leonard, the program director, sets the rhythm of the week, and the Goldbergs are in the house rather than behind a corporate desk. Residents are adults, treated as adults, and held to a schedule that does not move when someone has a bad morning.
The men’s stag among the five weekly AA meetings at Sherman Oaks United Methodist Church on Dickens Street gives a resident a men-only room to keep after he moves to Tarzana.
Men’s sober living in Sherman Oaks begins, in practice, with a dull first week of logistics: paperwork, a bed, a chore, a curfew, a list of phone numbers. The second week is when the resistance turns up, usually disguised as an argument about something small. Men who get through it are generally the ones who stopped negotiating and simply did what the day required. By the fourth week most have found a home group, filed job applications and started sleeping through the night again.
None of that is dramatic, which is the point. Recovery in a house like this looks like laundry, rides, a shared kitchen and a meeting at seven. A closer look at the daily routine fills in the hours between. Men arriving from residential treatment often say the hardest adjustment is the freedom: nobody confiscates a phone here, and nobody blocks the front door. What holds is that seven other men notice when you walk out of it.
The Los Angeles Central Office lists a men’s stag among the five weekly AA meetings at Sherman Oaks United Methodist Church, 14401 Dickens Street. A stag is often where a man finally says the thing he will not say in a mixed room, and keeping that meeting after a move to Tarzana is a straightforward drive east. Radford Hall at 4849 Van Nuys Boulevard is a dedicated recovery meeting hall a few minutes north of the boulevard, carrying several AA meetings of its own.
Residents are expected to build a meeting schedule rather than attend at random. A home group, a sponsor and a commitment such as making coffee or stacking chairs are worth more than a month of anonymous attendance. The women’s house runs on the same principle with a different set of rooms and a different set of meetings.
Work is not paused here, it is scheduled around. The Sherman Oaks Galleria office complex holds Hertz corporate headquarters and Warner Bros. offices, and the studio complexes in Studio City, Universal City and Burbank sit a freeway run east of the neighbourhood. Residents keep shifts, interviews and trades, and the house calendar is built to protect a working day. Men who arrive without a job start looking in week two, because empty afternoons are where the trouble starts.
For a man rebuilding a resume around a gap, the workable strategy is a job that pays now and a plan that pays later. The men’s program page follows that arc over a longer stay, and nobody at Sunshine will pretend that the first job after treatment has to be the last one.
There is evidence behind it. In a study that followed 245 sober living house residents over eighteen months, abstinence rose from 17 per cent at entry to 45.5 per cent at six months and 49.1 per cent at twelve months, while the share reporting an arrest fell from 41.9 per cent to 22 per cent. Those are not miracle figures. They describe what tends to happen when a person lives somewhere that expects something of him.
Pressure from a house manager is easy to resent. Pressure from a man thirty days ahead of you, who remembers exactly how the second week felt, is harder to shrug off. The case for sober living is worth reading before moving in, and the answer usually comes down to who is standing in the kitchen at eleven at night.
Relapse is common and it is not proof that treatment failed. NIDA puts relapse rates for substance use disorders at 40 to 60 per cent, in the same range as the 50 to 70 per cent seen in hypertension and asthma, and treats a return to use as a signal that care needs to resume or change rather than a verdict on the person. Nobody in this house pretends it does not happen to good men who meant it.
What matters is the response. A man who tells the truth quickly gets help quickly, which may mean a referral into intensive outpatient treatment or, if the situation calls for it, back into licensed residential care. Sunshine is recovery housing rather than a treatment provider, and admissions works with licensed California facilities and Joint Commission-accredited providers to arrange that step.
Families in Sherman Oaks tend to call with the same worry: he says he is fine, and he has said that before. A structured house replaces a family’s guesswork with somebody else’s schedule. Parents stop being the curfew. Partners stop being the drug test. That single change lowers the temperature in a household and gives everyone a chance to talk about something other than drinking. The questions worth asking any operator are a sensible place to begin, and families comparing men’s sober living near Sherman Oaks tend to ask the same five or six of them.
The shape of the first thirty days is predictable, and that predictability is deliberate.
| Timeframe | What is expected | What it builds |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 7 | Intake, house rules, chore rotation, first meetings | A routine that does not depend on mood |
| Days 8 to 14 | Job search or return to work, sponsor contact | Something to be accountable for by day |
| Days 15 to 30 | Steady work, a home group, savings started | Evidence that ordinary life is possible |
| After 30 days | Longer-range planning with the program director | A stay measured in months, not weeks |
The house does not run a clinical program; the schedule above is housing structure, not treatment.
The house is about 6.5 miles from Sherman Oaks, roughly 12-18 minutes in normal traffic. The full route, turn by turn, is on the directions page below.
Sunshine Sober LivingSunshine Sober Living accepts men and women aged 21 and older, and admissions will explain exactly how rooms and shared space are arranged before anyone commits to a move. Whichever side a resident joins, the standards are identical: substance-free living, random testing, chores, curfew and a daytime commitment to work, school or outpatient care.
Yes, and it is encouraged. Work gives the day a shape that house rules alone cannot, and a paycheque restores something treatment cannot hand back. The program director helps residents fit interviews and shifts around meetings, chores and any outpatient appointments already in place, so the job supports the recovery schedule instead of competing with it.
Curfew, chores and testing are house rules rather than suggestions, and the program director handles what follows a breach case by case. Residents are told at intake how the rules work and what happens when one is broken, so nothing arrives as a surprise. The purpose is never punishment; it is keeping the house safe and predictable for everybody living in it.
Residents must be 21 or older. Sunshine Sober Living houses adults, including men with co-occurring mental health conditions who are committed to long-term recovery, and the expectations assume adult responsibilities such as work, school, family obligations and outpatient appointments. Anyone under 21 should ask admissions for a referral to a provider set up for that age group.
Sunshine is recovery housing, not a medical facility, so it does not prescribe, dispense or manage medication as a clinical service. Residents keep their own prescribing clinician and remain responsible for their own prescriptions. Admissions discusses current medications during the assessment so that expectations are clear before move-in, and refers residents to licensed providers for anything requiring medical oversight.
What we run is recovery housing: a substance-free address with rules, accountability and peer support. Clinical treatment belongs with licensed providers, and admissions can arrange that referral. Nobody, including us, can guarantee how any individual recovery will go. If you or someone you love needs immediate help, the SAMHSA National Helpline is free and confidential on 1-800-662-4357, 24 hours a day.
If you are a man in Sherman Oaks deciding where to live after treatment, or a parent who has run out of ideas at the kitchen table, admissions will talk it through without pressure. Call 866-216-9789 or begin with the client intake form. Sunshine Sober Living is rated 4.7 out of 5 by local reviewers, and the house is a short run west on US-101.