It started with a complaint, likely from a neighbor. Then there was a police drug raid, which turned up nothing. Then a string of citations, the last one for $4,000 and counting. There's been one administrative hearing; there will be another one Monday, Nov. 7.

In all, the controversy surrounding the non-descript white house on Mellor Avenue has a paper trail that stretches many years back, based on the ongoing claim by Baltimore County code enforcement that it is an illegal rooming and boarding house and a counter claim from the home's owner that the county's stance violates federal law.

Inside the home on a recent afternoon, 16-month-old Dominic, friendly and curious, rolled his baby walker across the soft carpet, smiling. His 22-year-old mother Jill, sat on the couch a few feet away.

"If I wasn't here, I'd probably be homeless," said Jill, a single mother who suffers from depression and anxiety and has battled addictions to alcohol and heroine in the past. "It really saved me."

Jill, who asked that her last name not be published because of the personal nature of her story, has been sober for six months and has lived in the home for the past six weeks.

Her landlord, Scott Alpert, is also her drug and alcohol counselor.

Alpert, a licensed clinical counselor from Ellicott City, owns and operates Central Maryland Addiction Counseling there. He has operated the sober house on Mellor Avenue for the past four years as a place for certain clients, such as Jill, who would otherwise be on the street and far more susceptible to relapse.

Housing is "crucial" for clients like Jill, Alpert said, "because if you don't have housing stability, you can't really do treatment with people at all."

Purchasing the home as "transitional housing" for clients was Alpert's way of combating an extreme lack of affordable housing in the area, especially for those maintaining sobriety, he said.

Were it just Jill and Dominic in the home, there would be no problem. But they share the home with two other adult clients of Alpert's. These are men who, Jill said, enjoy Dominic and are ideal roommates for her because they are also clean and sober. Each of them — Dominic included — has a private room.

But in Baltimore County, no more than two unrelated adults can live in a single-family home unless the home is permitted as a rooming or boarding house, which Alpert's home is not.

Hence, the citations and administrative hearings, the first of which the county failed to record, prompting Administrative Law Judge Lawrence Stahl to reschedule it for Nov. 7, Alpert said.

Monday, Alpert said he will put forward the same argument he gave during the first hearing, that the county is breaking the federal Fair Housing Act by failing to consider his tenants on Mellor — they all have disabilities and past addictions — the same as it does a traditional family.

It's an argument, based in stringent disability laws that require "resonable accommodations" for people with disabilities, that has risen in courts elsewhere in the country.

Pushing back with precedent

Ever since the federal Fair Housing Act was amended in 1988 to include people with disabilities, there has been "a great deal of litigation concerning the Act's effect on the ability of local governments to exercise control over group living arrangements, particularly for persons with disabilities," according to a 1999 joint statement on the issue by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The statement, posted on the DOJ website, says that local restrictions on the number of unrelated adults who can live in one home are not discriminatory against those with disabilities per se, but that localities must provide "reasonable accommodations" for people with disabilities, including alcohol or drug addictions.

An accommodation is generally reasonable if it does not "impose an undue burden or expense on the local government" or "create a fundamental alteration in the zoning scheme," according to the DOJ statement.

A provided example states that a home of four mentally disabled people would have no more impact on "parking, traffic, noise, utility use, and other typical concerns of zoning" than a related family, and suggests a waiver or exception to the local code would be a reasonable accommodation.

Complaints from neighbors can only be considered by the county if they are similarly based on legitimate concerns like parking, and not on "stereotypical fears or prejudices," the DOJ site says.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1995, in the case City of Edmonds v. Oxford House, Inc., that local ordinances that use family definitions for capping the number of tenants in a home are subject to the FHA and should be reviewed for discriminatory intent or effect.

In a similar 2007 case regarding sober housing, Jeffrey O. et al. v. City of Boca Raton in Florida, a U.S. district court judge ruled the city had to stop applying its limit of three unrelated tenants per home to recovering addicts until it had created a policy for accommodating their reasonable need to live with each other, away from drugs and alcohol.

"While I find no legal problem with the cap of three unrelated individuals per se, the limitation without any exception for handicapped individuals or an established reasonable accommodation procedure violates the FHA," wrote Judge Donald Middlebrooks.

Alpert said he introduced similar case law in the first county hearing that wasn't recorded, but that Stahl seemed like he "didn't know what to do with it."

Permit and parking

Lionel Van Dommelin, head of the county's code inspection and enforcement bureau, said he does not remember the county addressing the Fair Housing Act in prior hearings on the code.

As for Alpert's case, Van Dommelin said the county is "simply viewing it as an illegal rooming/boarding house" and is looking to "gain clarification and compliance" at the hearing.

Alpert said his tenants' disabilities should force the county to waive the need for a permit, which would require a certain amount of off-street parking that his Mellor home doesn't have and be an expense that would diminish the affordability of the housing.

He said a waiver would make sense for his house, especially because of its location adjacent to businesses and the Lighthouse family services center.

Jill said she is nervous about what will happen if the county succeeds in its case against Alpert.

When Dominic was born, he had to go through heroine detox for nine days. His father's not in the picture. When Jill and Dominic were living in the Gaudenzia rehabilitation center in Baltimore City with about 20 other women and their children, life was difficult. Women brought drugs in. Jill felt unsafe.

"It was pretty hardcore," she said. "There was a lot of chaos."

Living on Mellor has been a blessing. Alpert visits her there twice a week for counseling sessions. The location is perfect. Dominic is happy. Jill is looking for a job. She doesn't want to leave.

"I just want a stable environment for him," she said, watching her son play. "I've been staying on the right track, because I don't want to lose him."