Sunshine Sober Living provides structured men’s sober living for Reseda at 5650 Donna Avenue in Tarzana, just across the Victory Boulevard line. Men aged 21 and older keep a curfew, submit to testing and answer to a house manager while holding down jobs, classes and outpatient appointments. Admissions can be reached at 866-216-9789.
Most men arrive from a treatment bed with about a week of planning behind them. The house gives that plan somewhere to land: a bedroom, a schedule, and men who notice on the morning he decides to sleep through work. Reseda men usually keep their old commute, since the wider Reseda picture and how the week is built start from one stretch of boulevard.
Family members call first about as often as men do. The questions are usually blunt ones, about rules, the cost of failure, and whether a grown man will really put up with a curfew. Those answers are below. Women in the same position should read the women’s program page instead, since the meetings and daily concerns differ.
St. Innocent Orthodox Church at 5657 Lindley Avenue sits just across the Victory Boulevard line from Reseda, close enough that a man without a car can still make an evening meeting.
Move-in day is paperwork, a walk-through and an honest conversation about what the next month demands. A man unpacks, hands over anything not allowed, meets the house manager and learns the curfew. Within forty-eight hours he has a meeting schedule and a work plan. Nobody drifts for a fortnight while they find their feet, because the first two weeks after discharge are when the old routine reaches back hardest.
The people running this are not strangers to it. Elliot Leonard, the program director, has professional addiction-treatment experience including previous work at Jaywalker Lodge, and Richard and Wendy Goldberg have run the house as a family business since 2019. The people a resident deals with daily are the same ones a family meets at intake.
Isolation is where relapse plans get made. A man on his own can talk himself into almost anything by eleven at night. In a house of men doing the same work, that argument gets said out loud at the kitchen table, usually to somebody who tried it six weeks earlier. That is the practical value of shared recovery housing over an apartment with good intentions.
Peer structure also handles ordinary things badly served by therapy. Who drives whom to a meeting. Who covers a shift. Who says something when a man goes quiet for three days. The house does not manufacture brotherhood on a whiteboard; it puts men with the same problem under one roof with the same expectations.
The Storefront at 17751 Sherman Way runs a step study that suits a man rebuilding a routine he half-learned in treatment, and it is a straightforward trip up the boulevard. Closer in, St. Innocent Orthodox Church at 5657 Lindley Avenue sits across the Victory Boulevard line in Tarzana, within reach on nights when no car is available.
A resident is expected to have a home group, not just an attendance count. Men who lived in Reseda before treatment usually keep the rooms they already know, so the drive matters; the route between Reseda and the house is short enough to keep a Tuesday commitment after a full shift.
Employment is expected, and the Valley’s geography cooperates. Warner Center in Woodland Hills is a straight run west, the Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way corridors carry retail, trades and auto work, and the Reseda skate and ice rink on Sherman Way is a $26 million venue partly managed by the LA Kings. Men on night shifts can still meet the house schedule if the plan is agreed in advance.
For men rebuilding physical health, the West Valley Family YMCA at 18810 Vanowen Street is a useful anchor, because early recovery goes better with somewhere to put restless energy. Work, gym, meeting, sleep is not a glamorous week, but for the first ninety days it is a week that holds.
Longer than he wants to. NIDA reports that better outcomes are generally associated with treatment lasting more than ninety days, and that people with severe substance problems or co-occurring disorders typically need at least three months. A man who arrives planning on six weeks is usually planning around a lease, and that plan tends to collide with the point where confidence outruns the actual foundation.
Research on sober living houses points the same way. In an eighteen-month study of 245 residents, abstinence rose from 17 per cent at entry to 45.5 per cent at six months and 49.1 per cent at twelve, arrests fell from 41.9 per cent to 22 per cent, and 12-step involvement predicted nearly every outcome. Men considering an early exit should read those figures twice.
Expectations are set out before move-in, so consequences are never a surprise. Testing is part of the deal, curfew is not negotiable, and dishonesty about either is treated as serious rather than minor. What follows depends on the situation and on what a man is willing to do next, and that conversation involves the program director rather than an anonymous policy document.
Where a return to clinical care is the right answer, admissions refers to licensed California and Joint Commission-accredited providers, including outpatient programs that run alongside housing. Nobody is put out on Reseda Boulevard with a bag and no phone number. The goal is that the next move is a step rather than a fall.
The early weeks follow a rough shape, adjusted to the man and what he arrived with.
| Stretch | What it asks | What it builds |
|---|---|---|
| Days 1 to 7 | Settle in, learn the rules, meeting schedule set | A routine not run on willpower |
| Days 8 to 14 | Work search or return to work, home group chosen | Daytime purpose and a room he belongs to |
| Days 15 to 30 | Steady hours, chores, weekly money check-in | Evidence he can be relied on |
| Day 30 onward | Review the plan, extend goals, look at savings | A reason to stay past the dull part |
None of it works if a man is only present in body, and the house says so early.
The house is about 2.5 to 3 miles from Reseda, roughly 8-14 minutes in normal traffic – the shortest run of any area we serve. The full route, turn by turn, is on the directions page below.
Sunshine Sober LivingSunshine Sober Living serves both men and women aged 21 and older, and the program pages are separate because the day-to-day realities differ. Admissions is the right place to ask about current living arrangements, since availability changes. Call 866-216-9789 and ask directly rather than guessing from a website.
Often the same day as discharge, which is usually the best timing. The gap between a treatment bed and a stable address is where plans fall apart, so admissions coordinates directly with the discharging facility. What matters is that detox is medically complete and the man is committed to the structure.
Yes. Men managing depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder or PTSD alongside a substance use disorder live here, provided they are stable and engaged with their own providers. The house is not a clinical setting and does not deliver therapy or manage medication. It supplies the structure around treatment somebody else provides.
Both come up on every intake call. Vehicles, visits and overnight passes are governed by house policy, and the specifics are covered before move-in so nobody is caught out. Anything that could pull a resident away from the schedule gets discussed in advance rather than improvised.
He looks for one, and the search is treated as the job. Mornings go to applications, interviews and errands; afternoons to outpatient care or volunteering; evenings to meetings. Unstructured days are the enemy in early recovery, so a man without work fills his hours deliberately and reports back at the weekly check-in.
Sunshine Sober Living is structured sober living. It is not a hospital, a detox unit or a clinical program. Where someone needs medical or clinical care, our admissions team refers to licensed California providers and to Joint Commission-accredited facilities. Outcomes in recovery are individual and cannot be guaranteed. 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 a man in your life is leaving treatment and the next address is unsettled, the useful move is a phone call. Call 866-216-9789 or email info@sunshinesoberliving.com to schedule a confidential assessment, or send admissions a message and set a time to see men’s sober living in Reseda for yourself.