Sunshine Sober Living runs a men’s house at 5650 Donna Avenue in Tarzana for men aged 21 and older from Studio City and the surrounding San Fernando Valley. Residents live substance-free under a curfew, test randomly, attend twelve-step meetings and return to crew work, trade jobs or school while rebuilding independence.
Most men arrive here tired rather than defiant. Treatment is finished, the family is hopeful and cautious in equal measure, and the question of where to sleep on Thursday has no good answer yet. Going back to an empty place near Ventura Boulevard, alone, with a phone full of old numbers, is how a good discharge plan quietly falls apart.
The men’s side of the Tarzana house is built for that gap. Chores, curfew, testing and a room full of men who can tell when something is off. Richard Goldberg founded the residence in 2019 and Program Director Elliot Leonard runs the program, and what the men’s program asks for is participation rather than performance.
US-101 Exit 15 at Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Exit 14 at Laurel Canyon Boulevard put Radford Studio Center and the Burbank lots within minutes of each other.
Very little of it is dramatic. Get up when the house gets up. Do the chore assigned to you. Be back before curfew. Take the test whenever it is handed to you. Get to a meeting most nights and speak in one of them. Tell the house manager where you are going. Men’s sober living in Studio City comes down to this list far more than to any philosophy. The rules are small on purpose, because a man in his fourth week out of treatment does not need philosophy, he needs a schedule he can follow when he feels flat.
The month after discharge carries the sharpest risk in the whole process, which is the subject of why so many people relapse within thirty days of leaving rehab. Isolation does most of the damage. A man who eats dinner with five other men and gets asked directly how his day went has a much harder time hiding the beginning of a slide, and hiding it is the part that turns a bad afternoon into a lost year.
Nobody in the house is fooled by a confident tone. The men living alongside a new resident have each made the same excuses in the same words, usually within the past year, and they say so. That is the mechanism. It is not therapy and it does not pretend to be, it is a group of adults who notice a skipped meeting and mention it at breakfast.
The research points the same way. In an eighteen-month study of 245 sober living 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 involvement in twelve-step groups predicted nearly every outcome the researchers measured. Attendance is not a formality on the schedule. It is the variable that moved. The structure the house keeps exists to protect it.
The neighbourhood has three listed venues worth knowing. The Thirty-Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist at 4032 Whitsett Avenue carries the As Bill Sees It and At Our Whitsett’s End AA meetings according to the Los Angeles Central Office. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City at 12355 Moorpark Street is a listed AA location. The Beeman Park meeting has run for years at the Studio City Recreation Center, 12621 Rye Street.
Whether any given room on a given night is a men’s stag meeting changes with the schedule, and the Central Office listing is the place to confirm it rather than word of mouth. Men in the house are encouraged to hold one home group and actually keep it, including on the nights when the drive back is a nuisance. Those directions are set out on the route page between the two neighbourhoods.
Crew work in this part of the Valley means Radford Studio Center on Radford Avenue, NBCUniversal one exit east, and the Warner Bros. and Walt Disney lots over in Burbank. US-101 Exit 15 at Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Exit 14 at Laurel Canyon Boulevard put a man within minutes of all of it. The trouble is not the commute. It is the fourteen-hour day, the six-day week, and the wrap that leaves a man with nothing booked and nowhere to be.
So the plan gets written for both halves, because men’s sober living near Studio City has to survive a shoot week and a fallow one. Which meeting survives a shoot week. Who gets a phone call on day three of unemployment. Whether a course at Los Angeles Valley College on Fulton Avenue fills the gap between contracts. Men whose treatment plan still includes clinical hours attend an intensive outpatient program around the work schedule, and the house manager knows the call sheet before the week begins.
Longer than he wants to. Federal guidance from the National Institute on Drug Abuse holds that outcomes improve when care runs beyond ninety days, and that men with severe substance problems or co-occurring conditions generally need at least three months before anything settles. Thirty days feels like enough from the inside of week four, which is precisely the problem with deciding at week four.
Practically, the men who do best treat the house as a base rather than a sentence. They take the job, save the money, repair what can be repaired at home, and leave when there is somewhere real to go. A conversation about timing belongs at intake and again at month two, not on the morning somebody packs.
That call comes in most weeks, usually from a mother or a wife. He finished the program, he is doing fine, and he has a friend with a spare room in Studio City. The instinct to argue is understandable and rarely works. What tends to move a man is a specific, small, time-limited proposition rather than an ultimatum about the rest of his life, and there is more on that in what to do when someone refuses sober living after rehab.
Comparing men’s sober living in Studio City with a spare room is easier with the wider context, and families can read the broader picture of sober living options across the Studio City area before making the case, and men who would rather be nearer the eastern Valley sometimes look at the Sherman Oaks men’s page as well. The residence is not a locked facility and nobody is admitted against their will.
The demands on a resident shift as the routine takes hold.
| Stage | What the house asks | What it looks like with crew work |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks one to four | Curfew, chores, testing, a meeting most nights | Job search or light work only, no overnight shoots |
| Month two to three | A home group, a sponsor, steady employment | Back on set, call times cleared in advance |
| Month four to six | Savings, family repair, service commitments | Longer contracts, planning through the gaps between jobs |
| Month six onward | An exit plan with an address and a budget | A working life that no longer depends on the house |
The timeline bends around the person rather than the other way round.
The house is about 10 miles from Studio City, roughly 16-25 minutes in normal traffic, and longer at peak, since this stretch of US-101 through Sherman Oaks is one of the Valley’s most congestion-prone. The full route, turn by turn, is on the directions page below.
Sunshine Sober LivingStag meetings do run in the area, but the roster changes and the Los Angeles Central Office listing is the reliable source for which rooms carry them on which night. The three listed local venues are on Whitsett Avenue, Moorpark Street and Rye Street at Beeman Park. House staff help a new resident find a men’s room he can commit to rather than sampling a different meeting every evening.
Shared chores, shared meals when schedules line up, a weekly house meeting, and men who notice. If somebody stops going to his meeting or starts sleeping through the morning, it gets raised directly and early. There is no points system and no public shaming. The value sits in being known well enough by a handful of people that a quiet slide becomes very difficult to conceal.
Usually yes, once the routine is established, and rarely in the first few weeks. Night work is arranged with the house manager ahead of time so that sleep, testing and meeting attendance still fit somewhere in the week. The house is not trying to cost anyone a paycheck. It is trying to stop an irregular schedule from quietly erasing everything the resident committed to at intake.
Most men begin within the first few weeks, and the house expects some form of daytime occupation. Employment, classes, volunteering and outpatient hours all count. Moving too fast into a punishing sixty-hour contract in week two tends to backfire, so the sequence is discussed with staff. A man with no daytime structure at all is the one at real risk.
It is treated as information rather than as a verdict. Staff talk with the man about what level of care he now needs, which may mean a return to detox or residential treatment through an outside licensed provider, or a tighter plan inside the house. Sunshine Sober Living does not provide medical care, so referrals are arranged with licensed California facilities when that is what the situation calls for.
Sunshine Sober Living provides structured recovery housing and transitional living. Medical detoxification, residential clinical treatment and other higher levels of care are provided by appropriately licensed treatment providers, and our admissions team can arrange a referral. Recovery is personal, and no sober living program can guarantee a particular outcome. 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 a week out from discharge and the housing question is still unanswered, the useful next step is a short conversation rather than another argument. Admissions will ask what he needs and say honestly whether this house fits. Call 866-216-9789 to schedule a confidential assessment, or begin the intake paperwork when he is ready.