Army says stick em' in apartments!

Military groups disagree - Off-base troops entitled to standard equal to those on base, they say
By Rick Maze - Army Times

A decade-old policy for setting military housing allowance rates — which assumes virtually all enlisted personnel and junior officers will live in apartments and townhomes rather than single-family homes — is under fire from major military associations that are urging Congress to order a change.

The Defense Department policy used to set basic allowance for housing rates assumes that the only enlisted members requiring a single-family home are E-9s with dependents.

BAH payments are set to cover 100 percent of average housing costs for the type of housing assigned to each paygrade. Pentagon officials said service members are still free to live where they choose, but under these housing standards — in use since 1997 and correlating with the living conditions of civilians making the same income — troops who seek housing beyond their assigned standard can expect to pay part of the higher costs out of their own pockets.

The standards were set when the Defense Department shifted from paying housing allowances based on the actual reported rents of service members to a plan that set allowances based on surveys of local housing costs in almost 400 locations around the country.

The standards have been changed just twice since they were adopted. Congress ordered allowances for E-3s and below to be raised in 2001 because of concerns that paying enough to rent only a one-bedroom apartment for single troops, and a two-bedroom apartment for those with dependents, was not providing adequate money for them to maintain a decent standard of living.

This year, defense officials made another change, deciding that the rate for people without dependents should be no less than 75 percent of the rate for a person with dependents in the same paygrade.

Kathleen Moakler, government relations director for the National Military Family Association, said the housing standards need to be revised so that people living off base are treated the same as people living in base housing.

“In the calculation for BAH, there is no regard for family size,” Moakler said. “In addition, the standards are based on an outdated concept of what would constitute a reasonable dwelling.”

Living on base, an E-6 or E-7 with dependents likely would be assigned a single-family home with the number of bedrooms based on the number, age and gender of children. However, BAH housing standards have just two rates — with and without dependents — that do not consider family size.

Defense officials acknowledged in a January pamphlet that housing allowances do not necessarily cover the cost of renting off-base housing equal to what a person could receive on base. They do not consider this a flaw, but a sign that government housing surpasses local housing in terms of size and quality, and note that the government tries to provide families with enough bedrooms to meet their needs.

They say housing allowances should be viewed as comparable to civilian compensation — those who make more money can live in larger homes than those with less income.

Major military associations have been trying for years to get the housing standards raised, but they were sidetracked by a five-year effort, launched in 2000 by then-Defense Secretary William Cohen, to increase housing allowances to fully cover the average off-base rental costs.

Prior to that effort, service members were expected to pay as much as 15 percent to 20 percent of their housing costs out of pocket. Cohen’s plan provided annual BAH increases that were slightly higher than the annual rise in local rental costs, which eliminated the out-of-pocket gap.

The Military Coalition, a group of more than 30 military-related associations sharing a common legislative agenda, has been trying since 2005 to get lawmakers to revise the BAH standards, but their initiative has been obscured in a sea of other legislative issues, particularly combat-related pay and benefits issues, which have a higher profile.

Military associations are pressing anew for action, hoping that because 2008 is an election year and because most of the major combat-related pay issues are resolved, they can get Congress to pay more attention to the off-base living conditions of service members and their families.

As ammunition, Joseph Barnes of the Fleet Reserve Association, a co-chairman of the Military Coalition, cites a 2007 survey of Navy, Marine and Coast Guard enlisted members done by his group in which almost 70 percent of respondents said they “believe BAH rates are inadequate.”

The survey also showed housing allowances ranked second only to basic pay in terms of importance to overall quality of life, he said.

Barnes said he hopes Congress will order “more realistic housing standards, particularly for career senior enlisted personnel.”