A new residential rehabilitation facility is in the works for the vacant land at 19th Avenue and Cactus Road, at the foot of Shaw Butte (rendering courtesy of America’s Rehab Campuses).
America’s Rehab Campuses is set to open a new outpatient facility at the southwest corner of 19th Avenue and Thunderbird Road in early 2025. After a year-long process of renovating a leased space at 1911 W. Thunderbird, they are ready to open and are just awaiting state inspection and licensing – expected to take place in January.
The company’s efforts in the neighborhood actually began years prior, with the purchase of some land at the intersection of 19th Avenue and Cactus Road, at the foot of Shaw Butte. Originally founded in 2017 in Tucson, the company opened their first facility there in 2018. The move into the Shaw Butte neighborhood was prompted by what they saw as a need in the area, says Michael Zipprich, founder and COO, who worked with city leadership to determine where their next satellite location would be.
“When we looked at this area, we realized that this is sort of ground zero – from Dunlap to Thunderbird, from 19th Avenue all the way to 35th Avenue is a very large population of drug addiction and homelessness,” Zipprich said. “The city knows that, we know it, so, we took a while to try to determine what would be a good location. That’s why we settled on this property, which we currently own.”
The Cactus Road facility is still at least a couple of years out, Zipprich adds, as they work through the site planning with the city. When complete, the facility will provide inpatient residential rehabilitation and detoxification services. CEO Franklyn Jeans explained what that looks like at their Tucson facility.
“We have a full continuum of care facility down there,” Jeans said. “We do detoxification followed by residential rehabilitation and outpatient rehabilitation and those are three distinct sets of services with three distinct licenses and treatment.
“If we can take people in and detoxify them and keep them residential for a period of time and then put them in detox, it really lowers the recidivism rate,” he added. “The problem with this kind of treatment is recidivism. So, if we can keep people focused on rehabilitation and recreating their lives, we can really lower the number of people who come back.”
The Thunderbird facility will serve as an outpatient facility that will work in tandem with the Cactus facility when complete, but state law requires that the two types of facilities are separate. In the meantime, Zipprich says that they can serve several hundred people out of the 10,000-square-foot Thunderbird location, and they will be good neighbors to the surrounding residents.
“We are the neighborhood watchdog,” Zipprich said. “We have great relationships with the police, the fire department, and we find that when we go into a neighborhood, the drug dealing and that kind of stuff starts to go away.”
He added that since purchasing the property at Cactus they have “mitigated the homeless problem on the mountain by 95 percent, because of the way we manage our business and the way we work with the police department.”
They will also focus on Cave Creek Park – Thunderbird where the park and wash area has seen issues with drug use.
“That kind of stuff gets cleaned up when our outreach program goes into place,” Zipprich said. “We start going around into those areas and offering services to people that don’t necessarily have the ability to either get to the services or they don’t know that they exist that close to their area.”
He added, “Some neighbors feel like [facilities] can attract the problem. But the problem is already there. Our job is to get it cleaned up.”
Learn more about the company at www.americasrehabcampuses.com.
