A running gag in cartoons is the guy or girl carrying a seemingly impossible load. A fly lands on top, and the whole mess crashes to the ground. The fly, though nearly weightless, was just one thing too many.

Something similar is going on in Rochester's Corn Hill neighborhood.

Neighbors were fine, says Steve Baldwin, when Pathway Houses of Rochester, a nonprofit supportive living program for recovering alcohol and substance abusers, bought a second house in the neighborhood around Lunsford Circle Park in 1991. (The first house has been there since 1958.) But Pathway's plan to open a recently purchased third house in a few weeks has some neighbors saying enough is enough.

"I support them in Corn Hill," Baldwin says. "It's only this intense concentration that we have a problem with."

The two current Pathway homes are located diagonally across from each other: one on Frederick Douglass Street and the other on Glasgow Street. Each serves 10 men. The third Pathway home, which will serve four men, is located between the other two houses on the corner of Frederick Douglass and Glasgow.

Buying the third home was a good financial investment, says Pathway Executive Director Glen Smith. And, given the location of the third home, Pathway officials were worried about who might move in there and the temptation they could bring.

"If we had people who were wild partiers, that'd be a concern of ours," Smith says.

But Baldwin says that Pathway is changing the character of the neighborhood and that's bad for neighbors as well as Pathway's clients.

"I was under the impression that the idea was to assimilate people back into the community," he says. "Well, they've become the community. It's becoming a neighborhood of institutions."

Neighbors are working with an attorney to see if there's anything they can do to fight the third home.

Smith says Pathway doesn't view the third house as an expansion; it's simply a relocation, she says, from other Pathway properties.

"We're talking four people who are well on their way to recovery," Smith says.

The clients, she says, are working, going to school, and doing volunteer work in the community.

"They're really motivated individuals who are trying to get their lives back on track," she says. "Housing is a big issue for people in recovery. What they're trying to do is relocate in an area that's not drug infested."