It is Brooklyn’s Betty Ford Center.
Red Hook could be getting a high-end drug rehabilitation center called the Urban Recovery House, where patients would pay as much as $50,000 for a 28-day stay just steps from the muddy banks of New York Harbor. Such a project is long overdue, according to the guys putting their money behind the venture.
“We expect high-net-worth individuals and families,” said Michael Mosberg, one of Urban Recovery’s backers. “There’s a glaring deficiency in New York for this kind of facility.”
The center, which owners hope will open in 2016, will offer live-in patients such addiction-combatting treatments as yoga, acupuncture, and music therapy and will not accept health insurance or government assistance money. The pitch led one Red Hooker to question exactly who the facility is intended to serve.
“Are we talking about average people?” asked Robert Berrios, spokesman for Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church. “Or are we talking about Justin Bieber?”
The rehab clinic is planned for the corner of Richards and Van Dyke streets and would include 30 beds in a five-story building. The ground floor would be reserved for parking as a way of protecting from floods.
Neighbors were freaked out about the prospect of the place being a methadone clinic, having bid multiple fill-in-fix centers good riddance in years past.
“It was like ‘Dawn of the Dead’ with people walking around the neighborhood,” said John McGettrick, Red Hook Civic Association co-chairman, about the scene on the streets outside the heroin-substitute stations.
But the brains behind the latest get-clean clinic assuaged the concerns at a community board meeting on Thursday.
“Never will we be a methadone clinic,” said Mosberg. “We are an inpatient facility.”
The program he wants to run is based on total abstinence, he added.
Mosberg is a partner in the project with Johan Sorensen.
The pair expect their facility to create about 50 jobs, including clinical, support, and maintenance staff positions. They pledged to hire locally whenever possible.
The project planners also said they would provide free assessments and referrals for Red Hook residents seeking drug treatment.
“Our passion doesn’t lie in getting the super-rich off drugs,” said Sorensen. “My passion is in helping people to get clean.”
