Downtown renovation displaces Alano
Eviction looms in the future for alcohol recovery center
By Sam Scott
Mort, a recovering alcoholic, is clear on the role the Mid-Peninsula Alano Club has played in his struggles with alcoholism. With it, he says he's been sober for four years. Without it, he says he'd probably be dead.
"It has meant everything to me," he says. "I don't know the words to tell you what this place means to me."
But if the Alano Club is to continue helping people get sober, its board of directors will have to find new digs very quickly. This summer, the city plans to raze the club's building in order to create parking spaces to mitigate the effect of downtown redevelopment. Three large office buildings are slated to be built in the parking lots near the Town and Country Shopping center, making parking a limited commodity.
Mike Chan, Sunnyvale's property manager, says the Alano Club will receive a 60-day notice shortly.
The eviction has loomed for years. The city rented the 7,100 square-foot space at 155 S. Taaffe to the club in 1996 at a reduced rate in exchange for the club making upgrades. Since the one-year lease expired in 1997, the club has been going month-to-month, knowing eventually the time would come to leave. The city's April 11 approval of construction of 460,000 square feet of office space means that time is now.
The Mid-Peninsula Alano Club has had to move before. Board president Jim Walker says the club, incorporated in 1982, has had a number of homes in its 18 years. The challenge to find new space, however, has obviously never been greater. A nonprofit that charges nominal fees to its members cannot compete in this market, he says.
Housed in an anonymous gray building next to the downtown post office, the club has offered a sober sanctuary in downtown Sunnyvale since April 1996.
Behind the street-front tinted windows sits the club's lounge--a large room with couches, a jukebox, video games and computer. In the back, two meeting rooms house more than forty 12-step meetings a week. The meetings are important, but Mort says it is the lounge that makes the club special. It's a place to socialize sober, something he was never able to do.
Robert, an 11-year member, agrees. "We don't get sober alone," he says.
Walker says they've tried to find places to move to no avail.
"We tried any resource imaginable," he says. "We just can't seem to find anybody to help us out." It is in everyone's best interest to have the club continue, he says. Society profits from people beating their addictions. Why else, he says, would Santa Clara County send people with substance abuse problems to the club as part of alternative sentencing?
Unlike an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a church or a YMCA, Walker says, the club offers support seven days a week, 15 hours a day. It provides a place to meet and relax with no chance of alcohol or drugs intervening. It takes the loneliness out of becoming sober.
"It's a place to go and hang out," Jim, a four-year member says. "And that's a very big deal."
Chan says the city is trying to help, but has had similar luck.
There are other Alano Clubs. Walker says the clubs have been around as long as Alcoholics Anonymous ("Alano" is short for those two words.) In this vicinity, he says, two are in San Jose and one is in San Mateo, but they are far away and inconvenient for many locals.
The Sunnyvale location, accessible by public transportation, will be a hard place to beat for many in recovery. But at this point, Walker and the others seem ready to take the best option that comes their way.
Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
