John almost lost it all.

He’d been sober for years when he started drinking again. He tried Alcoholics Anonymous, but it didn’t work. He lost his job. His health was deteriorating. He was losing his apartment.

“I just kind of lost control,” said John, now 40, in a recent interview. “Life became unmanageable.”

But with some convincing from relatives, John completed a 90-day residential program and is now living at a new “step-down” facility on Treasure Island that offers a transition between intensive recovery services and a more independent life for those at risk of homelessness.

The facility on Treasure Island has 72 beds to give residents secure housing while they continue to access outpatient services after completing a 90-day program. The beds, among the 212 for addiction treatment that Mayor London Breed plans to add in the next few years, are a crucial part of the behavioral health care system. Officials expect the last few open beds to be filled soon, after renovations were completed in September.

The beds come as elected officials have been facing intense pressure to mend the city’s fractured behavioral health system. Breed, the Board of Supervisors and officials at the health department all agree there aren’t enough places for those on the streets to receive shelter and treatment. The Treasure Island beds are a fraction of the 1,000 spots that Breed hopes to eventually add to the system.

About a month into living at the facility, John has a part-time job in San Francisco, is enrolled in classes that help him continue his recovery — including a class focused on relapse prevention— and sees a therapist.

“The whole idea is to move on and get back to where I was when I was sober,” he said. “I am trying not to waste any time — it’s a good opportunity.”

The Chronicle agreed not to publish John’s last name under the paper’s policy on anonymous sources after he cited privacy concerns.

HealthRight 360, the largest provider of addiction treatment services in San Francisco, operates the Treasure Island program. It runs 539 treatment beds sprinkled throughout the city out of a total of 609 residential spots.

“These new beds are an essential part of our strategy to get people stabilized, healthy and housed,” Breed said in a statement. “By continuing to expand access to services and treatment for our most vulnerable residents, we can address the very real challenges we see every day with people suffering on our streets.”

The facility, which spans several buildings on the island, features flats with bedrooms, common areas and kitchens. The residents share a dining room, where they can eat a catered breakfast and dinner, and a backyard. Shuttle service takes them to treatment in San Francisco and a staff of mentors help guide them through recovery, personal finances, job searches, social life and goal setting. The program costs about $1.9 million a year, which includes food, transportation, furniture, utilities, staffing and maintenance.

Residents can stay for up to two years at the program, which was designed for people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to participate in outpatient services because they don’t have housing.

Vitka Eisen, chief executive officer of HealthRight 360, said the program has had a “profound effect” on the lives of residents.

“It’s been a complete game changer,” Eisen said. “You have a safe place to live.”

Aside from offering a home, the Treasure Island facility features serenity.

From the backyard of one of the biggest buildings, the outline of the San Francisco skyline could be seen on a recent afternoon through haze and sunshine. Chirps from birds blended with the sound of a landscaping crew mowing a lawn nearby and the ticks of sprinklers dampening verdant yards.

The island’s sleepy feel won’t last forever. The nonprofit rents the units from the public agency that runs the island, the Treasure Island Development Authority, which is partnering on the ongoing redevelopment. Plans underway call for 8,000 new homes as well as a hotel and stores on the island and neighboring Yerba Buena Island by 2035. HealthRight 360 officials hope to continue the program after the redevelopment, even if it’s in different buildings.

But, for now, the facility is in a quiet place, well-located for overcoming addiction.

That quiet, and the program’s two-year residency, are crucial for healing the people who come there, said Thomas Wolf, a case manager at the Salvation Army’s Railton Place complex who works with homeless people struggling with substance abuse and mental illness.

“It’s not like, hey, you go through a bit of rehab and counseling and it’s all fine,” said Wolf, who was a heroin addict and has been clean and sober for nearly two years. “You weren’t just addicted for six months or a year — for me it was five years, and for some it’s 30 years.

“You can’t just expect someone to go in for 90 days and come out ready to go. It takes a long time to heal the damage you caused yourself and the damage you caused for others.”

He said it often takes six months just to “get some structure in your life; then the next six months is getting a plan for moving ahead, a resume and a job.

“Then the year after that is establishing credit, opening a bank account, saving money, looking for housing opportunities,” Wolf said. “It all takes time.

“People don’t consider these things. But this is reality.”

Steve Garcia, who runs the program, knows the value of a strong support network when struggling with an addiction. Garcia started drinking as a young man, then started using drugs, progressing from marijuana to cocaine to speed to heroin. He estimated he went through eight treatment programs throughout the state before he landed at San Francisco’s Walden House in 2003.

“I was just tired of doing what I was doing and just kind of surrendered,” he said.

He has been clean since and started working to help others.

“The hope is to help with the homeless population, the addiction issues,” he said. “Places like this, where they can come ... they continue their recovery while in the process of getting their lives together without having to worry about a place. ... It’s a sense of community here.”

More Information Editor’s note The Chronicle strives to attribute all information we report to credible, reliable, identifiable sources. Presenting information from an anonymous source occurs extremely rarely, and only when that information is considered crucially important and all other on-the-record options have been exhausted. In such cases, The Chronicle has complete knowledge of the unnamed person’s identity and of how that person is in a position to know the information. The Chronicle’s detailed governing the use of such sources, including the use of pseudonyms, is available here: http://sfchronicle.com/source-policy Broken Care: About this series San Francisco spends nearly $400 million a year on mental health and addiction treatment, but thousands of people in crisis are still without sufficient care. In this ongoing series, Chronicle journalists investigate the failures of this complicated, costly system and explore solutions to the crisis.

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Steve Fields, executive director of Progress Foundation, a mental health treatment nonprofit, said support for someone after they complete treatment is an important part of recovery.

“That’s the whole concept that we should be building in the whole city,” he said.

Fields also said placing recovery services on Treasure Island — which is physically removed from the city’s troubled neighborhoods — may make it easier for residents to maintain sobriety.

“You are not going to walk out your front door and have your dealer standing there in front of you,” he said.

Chronicle writer Kevin Fagan contributed reporting to this story.

Alejandro Serrano is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alejandro.serrano@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @serrano_alej