Sunshine Sober Living is a structured sober living residence at 5650 Donna Avenue in Tarzana, about ten miles west of Studio City. Adults aged 21 and older live substance-free there while holding jobs, attending outpatient care and going to meetings. Admissions arranges referrals to licensed detox, rehabilitation and outpatient programs when more care is needed.
Studio City is the entertainment industry’s residential back lot. Radford Studio Center sits at 4024 Radford Avenue, NBCUniversal stands immediately east at Universal City, and the Burbank lots are a short drive over the hill. Production work pays most of the rent in this neighbourhood, and production work does not keep office hours.
That is the part discharge planning tends to skip. A twelve-hour shoot day, a night call time and three empty weeks between gigs all press hard on a new routine. Sunshine Sober Living gives residents from Studio City a fixed address, a curfew and a daily structure that holds when the calendar will not.
Three named Studio City venues carry the local twelve-step schedule: Whitsett Avenue, Moorpark Street and the Beeman Park meeting on Rye Street.
Sober living is housing with rules, not clinical care. The Tarzana residence is a substance-free home where adults live alongside other people doing the same work, under a house manager, with testing and curfew in place. Residents keep their own therapists, their own outpatient providers and their own jobs. Nothing about the arrangement replaces treatment. What it replaces is the empty apartment, the old phone contacts and the unstructured afternoon that so often undoes the first month after discharge. Sober living in Studio City generally means an arrangement like this one, reached from the neighbourhood rather than sitting inside it.
A return to use is not proof that treatment failed. The National Institute on Drug Abuse puts relapse rates for substance use disorders at 40 to 60 per cent, a range comparable to asthma and hypertension, and reads a relapse as a signal that care needs to resume or change rather than as a character verdict. That is the honest case for staying somewhere structured longer than feels strictly necessary, and for asking early how long a stay should really last.
The residence sits north of Burbank Boulevard between Wilbur Avenue and Vanalden Avenue, two blocks from Tarzana Recreation Center. Mornings begin early. Beds get made, chores get done, and residents leave for work, class or an outpatient session. Richard Goldberg and Wendy Goldberg founded Sunshine Sober Living in 2019 and still run it as a family business, and Program Director Elliot Leonard handles the daily program. Local reviewers rate the residence 4.7 out of 5.
A weekday inside the house usually contains all of the following:
Three venues carry the neighbourhood’s twelve-step traffic. The Thirty-Sixth Church of Christ, Scientist at 4032 Whitsett Avenue is listed by the Los Angeles Central Office as the home of the As Bill Sees It and At Our Whitsett’s End AA meetings. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City at 12355 Moorpark Street is a listed Studio City AA location. The Studio City Recreation Center at Beeman Park, 12621 Rye Street, hosts the long-running Beeman Park meeting.
Knowing those three addresses matters more than it sounds. A resident who grew up going to Whitsett Avenue keeps that room after moving into the Tarzana house, and keeps the people in it. Sober living near Studio City works best when the meeting list follows the daylight hours. Meetings near work hold up better than meetings near the bed, because the drive home at nine at night is when the excuse arrives. Residents who want a longer stay in structured housing usually build their meeting list around the neighbourhood they actually spend daylight hours in.
By car it is roughly ten miles. From Donna Avenue the route runs south to Burbank Boulevard, east to Reseda Boulevard, south to US-101 and east through Encino and Sherman Oaks, exiting at Laurel Canyon Boulevard or Coldwater Canyon Avenue for the studio zone. In light traffic that is a twenty-minute run. At six in the evening the Sherman Oaks stretch of the Ventura Freeway is one of the slowest pieces of road in the Valley, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. The full turn-by-turn version lives on the Studio City route page.
Transit is workable for some jobs and not others. The Universal City/Studio City station on the Metro B Line subway sits at the eastern edge of the neighbourhood and runs straight to Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, and the North Hollywood terminus connects to the G Line heading west across the Valley toward Tarzana. Metro Lines 150 and 240 work the Ventura Boulevard corridor. A four in the morning crew call is still a car problem, so rides get planned at the house the night before.
There is no hospital inside Studio City itself. Sherman Oaks Hospital at 4929 Van Nuys Boulevard is the nearest option to the neighbourhood, Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center serves the Burbank side, and Cedars-Sinai is reachable over Laurel Canyon Boulevard. From the Tarzana house, Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center is minutes away. Sunshine Sober Living is a residence and not a medical provider, so anyone who needs supervised withdrawal is referred out for medically supervised detox first, and admissions works with licensed California and Joint Commission-accredited facilities to arrange it.
Residents who need clinical hours during the week attend a rehabilitation program or an intensive outpatient schedule and come home to the house afterward. If the situation is urgent tonight and nobody knows who to call, SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP is free, confidential and staffed around the clock in English and Spanish.
Freelance crew life runs in bursts. Six weeks of fourteen-hour days on a lot, then nothing booked, then a call at short notice for a job that starts Monday. Both halves of that cycle carry risk. Exhaustion erodes the evening meeting, and unemployment hands somebody a wide open Tuesday with money still in the account. Anyone weighing sober living in Studio City against a return to a familiar apartment should start with that cycle. Residents who work in production do better when the plan names both states in advance, including which meeting gets attended on a shoot day and who gets called during a slow month.
Four service pages cover the Studio City area, and each answers a different question.
| If this sounds familiar | Start here | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| A man leaving residential treatment who wants his crew job back | the men’s house | Peer accountability, stag meetings and returning to crew work |
| A woman who needs a safe address and privacy while she rebuilds | women’s sober living nearby | Safety, family contact and support for co-occurring anxiety |
| A family asking what recovery housing legally is in California | recovery housing explained | NARR levels, state licensing and length-of-stay evidence |
| Someone discharged next week with nowhere structured to land | structured transitional living | The bridge from treatment to an independent lease |
Anyone unsure which applies can call and describe the situation instead of choosing.
From Ventura Boulevard at Laurel Canyon Boulevard, head north on Laurel Canyon Boulevard to US-101 west, run through Sherman Oaks and Encino and exit at Exit 23 (Reseda Boulevard), north on Reseda Boulevard to Burbank Boulevard, west on Burbank Boulevard, then north on Donna Avenue. That is about 10 miles, 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.
Sunshine Sober LivingNo. The residence is at 5650 Donna Avenue in Tarzana, roughly ten miles west along US-101, and it serves people from across the San Fernando Valley including Studio City. Many residents keep working at Radford Studio Center or Universal City while living in Tarzana. The distance is deliberate for some people, because a little room between the old neighbourhood and the new bed helps early on.
Not always. Most residents arrive after residential treatment or detox, and that is the smoothest path. Others come from an outpatient program, from a court referral or straight from a living situation that stopped being safe. What matters is that the person is aged 21 or older, is not in acute withdrawal and is committed to staying substance-free. Admissions talks it through case by case before anyone commits.
Yes, and most do. Work is expected rather than discouraged. Residents on crew jobs coordinate call times with the house manager, arrange rides or transit ahead of long days, and keep their meeting commitments around the shoot schedule. The curfew still applies, and it is worked out in advance rather than argued about at midnight. Employment, school and outpatient appointments all take priority over house downtime.
The house is substance-free, without exception, for alcohol and every non-prescribed drug. Testing is random and can happen at any hour. Prescribed medication is disclosed at intake and stored according to house policy. Residents who use again are not simply thrown out into the street; the response is a conversation about what level of care is actually needed now, which sometimes means a return to treatment and sometimes means a tighter plan at home.
One phone call to 866-216-9789 begins it. Wendy Goldberg and the admissions team ask about the person’s history, current level of care, medications, work situation and timeline, then say plainly whether the house is a fit. If it is not, they point toward a provider that is. Families can also email info@sunshinesoberliving.com and schedule a confidential assessment before anything is decided.
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.
The call that starts this is usually short. Someone describes where their son, their sister or they themselves are right now, and admissions says whether a bed in Tarzana makes sense for a person living and working in Studio City. Schedule a confidential assessment on 866-216-9789, or reach the admissions office directly and ask the question you have been putting off.