Apartment Look

Six years ago, Mike Brown and Casey Lynch stood on Downtown Boise ’s 8th Street and wondered: Why don’t more people live here? Downtown seemed to have everything that a growing percentage of Americans wanted in a place to live. “I mean, there’s all kinds of jobs. There’s a million coffee shops and hair salons and restaurants, and there’s an active street life ,” says Brown, who founded the Los Angeles- based development company LocalConstruct with Lynch in 2008. Casey Lynch, left, and Mike Brown have made their mark in Boise. Provided by LocalConstruct But in 2011, fewer than 4,000 people lived in Downtown’s scattered apartment and condominium buildings and houses. On a typical weekday afternoon , most Downtown workers got in their cars and put the city in the rearview mirror. Brown and Lynch saw an opportunity. They thought Boiseans would trade ample floor space and vaulted ceilings in the suburbs for smaller, high- end Downtown apartments that offered amenities like gyms, a do...

The advertisements are everywhere. On television, a sleek black sedan pulls up to a sprawling estate with a rolling green lawn as a mother recounts how Recovery Centers of America saved her child from drugs. On Facebook, radio, highway billboards, and commuter trains, people are urged to call the company’s instantly memorable hot line : 1-800-RECOVERY. The marketing blitz and an infusion of private equity money have helped make Recovery Centers of America into the self-described fastest- growing addiction treatment provider in the country. Launched less than three years ago by a high- end real estate developer , it’s part of a rush of entrepreneurs who see opportunity in the treatment business as the opioid crisis sweeps the country. Advertisement But an investigation by STAT and The Boston Globe has uncovered evidence of shoddy care and turmoil inside the walls of the company’s two Massachusetts treatment centers . This report is based on interviews with more than a dozen fo...