Pentagon’s War on Military Housing Woes Mired in Stalemate

FT. CARSON, Colo. —  Tonette Hanna doesn’t need a weather forecaster to tell her when it’s snowing. The flakes blow right through the windows of her aging Army row house.

Nearly three years after the Pentagon persuaded an alarmed Congress to allow private-sector developers to step in and replace dilapidated military homes such as Hanna’s, it has spent $37.5 million on consultants without breaking ground on a single new housing unit.

Only two Navy projects under way before the program began have been funded. Meanwhile, the military says two-thirds of its family housing units are inadequate.

“In reality, we’re the biggest slumlords in the country,” said Michael J. Haze, chief of Ft. Carson’s housing division. “I have soldiers every day telling me they live in the projects.”

Defense Department officials, who in 1996 promised that eight to 10 projects totaling 2,000 new units would be awarded within a year, now blame legal and bureaucratic delays. They say several contracts are on the horizon and insist that things will improve.

Lawmakers who supported giving the military greater flexibility to form partnerships with developers now call it a good idea badly executed.

“This is just inexcusable,” said Rep. Tillie K. Fowler (R-Fla.), a member of the House National Security Committee. “The whole idea behind this was to quickly get housing for our members who are waiting, and instead it seems to be slowing it down.”

Behind the bureaucracy, thousands of military families continue to tolerate what the Pentagon acknowledges is shoddy, substandard housing because they cannot or will not pay higher rents for off-base housing. Even at Ft. Carson, about 2,000 families now living off the base are on a waiting list for housing.

When Scott Moore, a military police officer, moved his family into government housing at Ft. Carson, Army officials asked him to sign a lead-paint notification form. In effect, Moore said, the Army was saying, “If your kid eats paint, it’s not our fault.”

Susan Robbins, who also lives on the wind-swept base at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, complains frequently about cabinets falling off the walls, sliding doors off their runners, windows that won’t open or close, and flaking linoleum floors. Robbins, married to an Army enlistee, has grown accustomed to a slow response.

“When you live in government housing, they can do anything they want because they own you,” Robbins said.

Ft. Carson does the best it can within a generally declining housing budget, Haze said. The lead-paint form merely warns residents of the potential hazard and says that if paint starts chipping, maintenance will seal it in, he said. Some units have recently received new heating units, windows and kitchen appliances, he added.

But there is no debate within the military about the urgency of the problem involving 30- to 40-year-old housing units.

A Pentagon study found that 200,000 of the 300,000 family homes owned or leased by the government need to be renovated or replaced.

More than a third of active-duty service members who live with their spouses or family use military housing. Two-thirds of single members live in military housing. Most do so by choice; a few, such as base commanders and fighter squadron members, are required to live on base.

The size and quality of housing improves with rank, but problems exist in both officer and enlisted quarters. Defense officials worry that the deteriorating conditions will lower morale and increase departures.

Congress, concerned that traditional military construction methods were too costly and slow, created a five-year program beginning in 1996. It allows the Pentagon to provide loan guarantees, land leases, commercial incentives and the opportunity for contractors to own and operate the military housing units they build.

Ft. Carson was scheduled to launch the first project last year, allowing a developer to refurbish 1,824 units, build 840 more and take ownership of them all. Now, after months of legal and bureaucratic delays, the contract has been put off until late 1999.

With Ft. Carson delayed, the Pentagon plans to proceed later this summer with projects at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, and the Marine Corps Logistics Base at Albany, Ga.

“The program is not proceeding as fast as I think many had hoped, but it’s probably about the pace that should be expected,” said John Goodman, head of the Pentagon’s House Revitalization Support Office.

Unless the Pentagon begins to show some results, lawmakers warn that they may kill the program when it expires in 2000.

“I am embarrassed,” Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), who chairs a military housing subcommittee, said of the delays at Ft. Carson, which is in his district. “I am terribly disappointed in it.”

So far, consultants have been the big beneficiaries. Goodman said his agency spent $7.5 million over two years on consultants. And the military services have signed contracts for $30 million more over five years for private-sector advice.

The revitalization office has spent $16 million toward actual housing projects, mostly for the Navy projects in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Everett, Wash.

Lauren Ariker Korman, spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s housing revitalization office, said the consultants “are really critical to us. We need private-sector expertise.” She said that by 2000, as many as 30,000 military housing units could be under development.

A key start-up problem, Goodman told lawmakers, was that the Pentagon lacked the business savvy and technical skills to wade into the real estate market.

“It’s not rocket science, but it involves the kind of financial skills and analysis that the government doesn’t have,” Goodman said.

Daniel P. Cosgrove, chief executive officer of Defense Facilities Corp., an Alexandria, Va., firm that has worked on military construction projects, was skeptical: “There has never been a consultant’s contract that has delivered housing to military families.”