Finding Space for Change: Father Peter G. Young on Why Recovery Starts With a Room

Father Peter G. Young learned early that you can’t get clean on the same corner where you got high. In this clip from The Slingin Podcast, the Albany priest who spent decades housing people coming out of jails, courts and the street explains why recovery starts with a room, and what he asks of anyone who wants one.

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Watch: “Finding Space for Change”, Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast, Hoodz Radio.

Father Peter G. Young died on December 9, 2020, at age 90. Kay Bond recorded this conversation with him for The Slingin Podcast on Hoodz Radio.

In His Words

“We have to change the environment from the negative to the positive. So you need a place where you can make it happen. They can’t do it from the street.”

That’s the plan in three lines. Father Young describes a constant flow of people: letters every day from people coming out of jail, calls from folks saying, I’ve got someone, I need you to get them a place to stay. They’re stuck where the drugs and alcohol are. So when he hears about a motel, a hotel or any building with space, he goes after it. But the room comes with a question: do you have a desire? He calls that the third tradition, a desire to stop using chemicals or alcohol. Say yes, and you get a room, food, training and treatment.

A Room Has to Be Earned and Built

It started small. In his telling, before codes and zoning, getting space was easy. When his team saw an empty house in Albany’s South End, they asked the owner to give it to them or let them use it. In one year, he writes, volunteers opened more than fifteen small shelters there, running for a decade on parish and fellowship support with no public money.

He built it as a ladder. Men still drinking or using slept on the gym floor under supervision. When they accepted help, they moved upstairs into the closed school or the rectory. The reward after that was a private room at the Pier Hotel, a former brothel his crew cleaned up and turned into recovery housing with three open AA meetings a day.

The desire he asks about in this clip isn’t a formality. In Chapter 27 he admits to what he calls “creaming”: picking the clients who are willing to prove their work ethic, because the program needs leaders who will show hope to others. The people with a sincere commitment, he writes, will seek you out.

From the Memoir

The search for space runs through his memoir Fifty Years Young, from motels to entire housing blocks.

From Chapter 19, “Rosary Hall, NYSCA and the Selkirk Shelter,” he describes the kind of motel he’s talking about in the clip:

“Years later our largest shelter was Eleanor House in Selkirk, an eighty-bedroom motel we named for my mother, for women trapped by addiction with nowhere to turn. It reminded me of the Underground Railroad, moving women to a different turf where very few knew what had become of them.”

From Chapter 29, “Meeting the Challenge of the Planning Boards,” he’s honest that finding a building was only half the fight. Every town had the same answer: NIMBY, “not in my backyard.” He says he went to more than a hundred planning and zoning meetings, often alone, and was attacked more than once. His hardest lesson came in Poughkeepsie, at a hearing about housing six men who had finished treatment and had jobs lined up:

“The first person to stand up was one of their mothers. She said, ‘That’s my son, and I never want to see him again.'”

From Chapter 32, “Recovery Sites and the State Expansion of Services,” he explains why the room is only one piece. His three-legged stool puts recovery on the seat, held up by treatment, clean and sober housing, and training for the workplace:

“The stool can’t stand with any leg missing.”

Why It Matters Now

People are still walking out of jail with nowhere safe to sleep and going right back to the block that took them down. Father Young’s point holds up: if the environment doesn’t change, the person can’t. And he learned that neighbors can block the door even when the people inside have done everything right. His answer was to show community leaders how the people they represent benefit, bring the food, and listen to their concerns.

That’s the Legacy: a priest who turned gym floors, empty houses and an old motel into a way out. The Movement is making space now, in our neighborhoods, our churches and our hearts, for the person who says, “I have a desire.” Somebody has to clear the path home. It might as well be us.

Watch the full conversation with Father Peter G. Young on The Slingin Podcast at HoodzRadio.com, follow Hoodz Radio for more clips, and look out for 50 Years Young, our 10-part series on his life and work.

Respect the Legacy. Amplify the Movement.