Philly’s new drug rehabilitation center will open this month as part of Mayor Parker’s Kensington plan

A new city-operated rehabilitation facility for people in recovery from drug addiction will begin accepting patients this month in Northeast Philadelphia, marking a major milestone for Mayor Cherelle L. Parker a year after taking office.

Flanked by top cabinet members and local elected officials, Parker on Wednesday unveiled the Riverview Wellness Village, a former personal-care home in the shadow of the city’s jail complex that will have 340 treatment beds in its initial phase.

The mayor framed the opening as a critical component of her administration’s plan to end open-air drug markets across the city. She has made addressing the crisis in Kensington, where hundreds of people in the throes of addiction live on the street, a cornerstone of her first-term agenda.

“We will be a model for the nation about how you deal with this issue,” Parker said.

The opening at Riverview, the first in a multiphase plan, comes less than a year after Parker proposed spending $100 million to construct the first recovery facility operated by Philadelphia’s government. The administration estimates that once construction is complete, it will be able to house more than 600 people at a time — a significant expansion of the estimated 500 beds citywide that are currently in city-contracted recovery houses.

“What we are doing here today is, to many, the impossible,” Adam K. Thiel, the city’s managing director, said Wednesday during a news conference at the new facility at 7979 State Rd. Hundreds of people attended and gave Parker a standing ovation, including members of City Council, representatives of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration, and state Supreme Court Justice Kevin Dougherty.

Thiel said the facility will fill a gap in what is available to people seeking to recover from drug addiction. Patients will be referred to the facility after completing short-term, inpatient drug treatment elsewhere, and can live at the village for up to a year.

Parker’s efforts to address the decades-in-the-making opioid crisis have been met with a range of responses since she campaigned on opposing some progressive approaches to the problem, such as supervised injection sites and city-funded needle exchanges.

So while some cheered the effort to bolster the city’s network of recovery options, other advocates and legal observers raised concerns about the administration’s broader effort. Later this month, officials are planning to launch a “wellness court” in Kensington, where some people in addiction who are arrested for minor offenses could go before a judge and be offered treatment instead of criminal charges.

Some advocates said having people choose between recovery or the criminal justice system amounts to coerced treatment.

“We really miss the mark when we lead any of these efforts through police,” said Mike Lee, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

Parker on Wednesday said critics who say her administration is “criminalizing addiction” are wrong.

“Give us the opportunity,” she said, “to start building what doesn’t exist and focus on a comprehensive, long-term strategy: long-term care, treatment and housing, [and] getting the best and the brightest to come and serve our people.”

The first buildings to open at the 19-acre complex along the Delaware River are six cottages and a large communal space called the Meeting House. The cottages include shared bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, living areas, and spaces where people will receive a variety of types of medical and behavioral health treatment.

Several other structures remain under construction on the campus, and the Parker administration is building an additional residential facility on the premises.

In its initial phase, Riverview will be considered a “low-intensity” recovery house, meaning patients are admitted only if medical professionals deem that their withdrawal symptoms or other medical conditions can be managed outside a hospital. The administration said patients will be referred by other providers only after completing 30 days or more of intensive treatment elsewhere.

Thiel said the forthcoming wellness court program will not refer patients directly to Riverview.

Care on the campus is being delivered in part by third-party providers. The city contracted with Merakey, a behavioral health provider, to deliver addiction recovery services, and the Black Doctors Consortium to provide medical care, such as primary health care, disease management, and wound care.

Wounds are a particularly acute concern for people in addiction in Kensington due to the toxic nature of the street drug supply that increasingly includes the animal tranquilizer xylazine, which is also called tranq and can cause severe health complications like flesh wounds and painful withdrawal.

Officials have said they expect to accept individual patients, as well as couples and people who have pets, addressing two major barriers experts say can keep people from being placed or staying in treatment.

Patients also will have access to workforce development and other activities, such as culinary training, art therapy, fitness, a community garden, and job connections.

Leaders of some of the city’s largest health-care systems — including at Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson University — said in statements Wednesday that they support the city’s efforts.

“Big issues require innovative, multipronged solutions,” said Michael A. Young, president and CEO of Temple Health, “and the opening of Riverview Wellness Village is an important step to providing so many people with essential resources for long-term recovery in our great city.”

However, proponents of the harm-reduction model of approaching the opioid crisis said they were concerned, saying many people in Philadelphia face barriers to entering the higher levels of treatment that would be required before taking a spot at Riverview.

For example, advocate Frida Clark-Garcia said, many people who use xylazine have serious wounds that bar them from many inpatient treatment centers that don’t have the medical capacity to care for wounds.

”We’re looking at this crisis of unhoused people across the city of Philadelphia with horrible wounds and an inability to access a lot of or, honestly, any type of medical or social services and support,” Clark-Garcia said. “I don’t understand how this facility is addressing this greatest need.”

Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer said the new wellness court initiative will launch in Kensington on Jan. 21. The administration has framed the fast-track court as a key step to improving the quality of life in the neighborhood.

A police captain detailed the plan to Kensington residents late last year, saying police would conduct sweeps in the neighborhood and arrest people using drugs on the street, then issue them summary citations. The idea is that those individuals could go before a judge the same day and choose either to accept the charge and return to court at a later date, or to enter treatment.

But advocates have expressed concern about the arrests, saying people in addiction who are already on probation or who have open warrants could be jailed instead of placed in treatment. The city’s jails have been understaffed for years, and observers question the city’s ability to absorb an influx of prisoners with complex health needs.

The ACLU and a handful of other outside attorneys and advocates wrote in a December letter to the administration that the wellness court plan could “perpetuate harmful treatment of people in the Kensington neighborhood and place their constitutional rights at risk.”

Solomon Furious Worlds, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said Philadelphia police do not typically arrest people who are issued summary citations, meaning individuals arrested in Kensington could face a higher level of enforcement than in other parts of the city.

Worlds said advocates are also concerned that people will be asked to make decisions about whether to enter treatment while they are intoxicated.

“If the options are you need to be 100% treated and cured soon or face all the repercussions of the legal system,” Worlds said, “that’s a lot of pressure to put on someone.”