Bodha Recovery Residences Crooked in every way San Francisco California

To characterize Bodha recovery residences as crooked would be the understatement of the century. It is truly shady in every way imaginable. I don’t really know where to begin, but I guess I’ll start with the monetary aspect, which is honestly the least nefarious aspect of this business, and it certainly is a business above all else. At the house I lived in, on 23^rd avenue in the sunset district of San Francisco, one of the cheapest areas of the city, it cost 1300 dollars…to share a room.  Nine people live in the house, and the room I stayed in wasn’t actually a bedroom, but a dining room that was converted into a bedroom so they could cram more people into the house.

As a comparative reference, a group of my friends share a nearly identical house a few blocks away and pay $600 dollars each for their own private rooms. It’s a classic slumlord scam, as many sober living homes are, and most of the residents end up paying more than $1300 a month because they are always relapsing, after which you must pay a $200 “re-admit fee” to be let back in. Which brings me to my next point, the ethics, or troubling lack thereof. Many of the residents were chronically relapsing, some on an almost weekly basis, and were always let back in as long as they could pay the fee.

If not, they were dismissed. Instead of being recommended for the higher level of care they obviously needed, such as residential rehab, the fee was all that was important to the greedy, unscrupulous owners. Even with the lax stance on relapses (many SLEs will dismiss a client after one, or maybe two relapses) the house managers will award punitive “strikes” for such petty offenses as not making your bed correctly, or not doing a chore up to some vague, undefined standard. If you get enough strikes, you’ll get kicked out with no refund no matter how early in the month it is.

No matter how hard you try not to get a strike, it’s completely at the house manager’s discretion, and if they don’t like you, they’ll find a way to give you one (such as the aforementioned example, where I was given one not for failing to make my bed, but somehow not doing it correctly). Do you see what an ethical fallacy that is? You can relapse many times and keep getting let back in for $200, but be kicked out for frivolous reasons and get no refund on your rent. In both situations, they are benefitting financially by corrupt means.

They have a vested interest in kicking people out for any reason they can find (because with the “no refund” policy, a now-vacant bed is now being paid for--criminally overpaid for—so if, for example, somebody is kicked out near the beginning of the month, and are quickly replaced by a new client, Bodha is essentially collecting two separate rents for that same bed, in the same month), and they have a vested interest in keeping people around who chronically relapse (because they will continue to profit at a higher rate from those people). Pretty sleazy, huh? There is quite a disturbing lack of respect to the residents as well.

At the house I lived at, the house manager would routinely barge into my room without knocking. Never once did he even knock. One time he woke me up when I was sleeping because I felt under the weather, told me it was suspicious I was sleeping in the early evening (I had not been drinking or using) and that I immediately needed to do a piss test. I told him I really didn’t have to go yet and he insisted I “try”, because it couldn’t wait. On one occasion he came in and started yelling at me, at first for forgetting to do a chore, and then just started generally insulting my character. When I understandably got a bit defensive, he told me I was being “combative” with a house manager, which is against the rules in the “contract I signed” and grounds for immediate dismissal.

After that conversation, he was so enraged that I had even attempted to stand up for myself that he was visibly shaking, and needed to “go for a walk”, slamming the door on the way out so hard I literally thought he f**king broke it. How somebody so mentally unstable was ever appointed house manager is beyond me. After that he was finding any reason to give me strikes and was pretty much on a vendetta to have me kicked out, and of course the staff members higher up unequivocally believed everything he said and my word didn’t mean s**t. I never even went to staff members higher up about what i saw as his abuse of authority, as i was trying my best to take the high road and act like an adult.

Unfortuanately, the house manager wasnt as concerned about that, and would report any little thing, real or made up, often greatly exagerated, general "attitude problems", which were very subjective and purely conjecture (the obvious fact is that for some reason he simply disliked me), to those higher up, and the regional manager (this is a relatively big company, they have several houses) would come over and reprimand me and threaten to kick me out, and then i would feel the need to tell my side of the story.

So basically, the house manager, always the instigator, would acost me and treat me disrespectfully usually for no reason, or if for a reason he would always overreact, i would handle it as best as i could, trying to defuse the situation without letting him completely walk over me, i would be over it pretty soon, and he would stew about me not blindly and b****ingly respecting his authority and then go tattle on my as a child does to a principal when i did nothing wrong and only then would i be in a position where i would have to explain to the regional manager what he did wrong and she would always side with him instantly.

Evidently, the house manager is not held accountable for their behavior and can do whatever the hell they want. Writing this report is the only way by which i can hold any of these people accountable. Eventually I had enough and left. Let this be a cautionary tale. Do as much research as you can before choosing an SLE so you don’t get ripped off and have a similar experience. Do you really want to pay such an outlandishly high rate to be treated with absolutely no respect or dignity, risk having your money robbed on a petty technicality, all just to be at a place run by people who don’t really even care about the one primary thing they are supposed to care about, which is helping people stay sober?

Fyi it appears that all the positive reviews for Bodha on yelp as well as the piddling rebuttal to the other report on this site were written by bodha staff members (Seth, the owner and Lauren the program director both posted 5 star reviews on yelp) as if it wasnt obvious enough by the robotic, form letter fashion in which they're written. All the ostensibly real reviews i found were one star