Geez, really?

It came up again. The house thing. People have such a hard time finding houses here, apparently, and anyone who has had success in that way is just a target for so much nastiness. It's crap.

Yes, I have a house that works great for my family.

No, it isn't brand new, or in one of the hippest neighborhoods in town.

At the same time, it's obviously a good neighborhood since only senior military personnel (and a whole lot of civilians) live here.

No, I don't have to live on the northeast side, nor would I want to.

I'm not sorry that my husband has a short commute, and can come home and see me at lunch.

I really do think it's feasible for anyone to find an affordable place for them. It might be a trailer and it might be in the middle of nowhere. Your husband may commute an hour to work every day, but you will be able to find somewhere to live.

You know, when I arrived at Ft. Stewart in 2004, the housing market was 100x worse than it is here currently. It was to the point that if you saw a listing, you could bet it had already been rented out, and if you weren't willing to lease a house sight unseen, you weren't going to get a house. Believe it or not, it was 10x more of a crap shoot there than it is here, because there, there was only one zip code for the entire county, so the address didn't tell you anything about the neighborhood. Here, you can at least narrow it down to a few zip codes you're ok with. Rent hikes in proportion to BAH? Again, bitchy Army wife, meet Hinesville, GA. It was 10x more obvious and more drastic there than it is here. People just accept that the first year they're in their place, money's going to be tight unless they can finagle a promotion that comes with a BAH raise. (In other words, Sergeant or higher.)

I also know that there's a MASSIVE jump in housing allowance after the rank of Sergeant. The difference between a Sergeant and a Staff Sergeant doesn't look like much, but somehow, the biggest jump in housing allowance comes when one makes Staff Sergeant. It's hundreds of dollars' difference, whereas any other promotion will get you maybe $30-70 more than you were getting before. I don't know why this divide exists where it does (although I think it's fitting when you consider the average soldier's career progression), and I didn't put it there. I just happen to live on the better side of it NOW. I didn't always.

When Thak and I got married, he was a Sergeant. We got very little in housing allowance, and I had to find us a house in Hinesville, GA, in 2004. I found one. It was a tiny 2 BR/1 BA house with no kitchen counter space and tiny closets that were mostly taken up with weird utility odds and ends, but it was what we could afford, and we were happy with it. We miss that house to this day, as strange as that may seem. The ONLY time I actually paid much attention to what other people had was when we made the mistake of moving on post, and I had to watch Privates' wives getting bigger houses, with dishwashers and dining areas, while I paid more for the smallest floorplan on post, washed dishes by hand, and had to figure out how to fit my table into a tiny living room. I hate post housing. That's not a secret. When we didn't live on post, though, even when we lived in the tiny little house, I was never jealous or mean to wives who had more than I had. I was friends with a couple wives who were senior to me, and it just seemed obvious that they'd have bigger houses. If one woman's husband is a Sergeant First Class, and mine was a Buck Sergeant at that time, why wouldn't she have a bigger house than me? She had a nicer car, too... I also took that to be an obvious thing.

Even after Thak was promoted, and we moved to a nice 4 BR brick house in a popular neighborhood, nobody was mean to us about it. I knew people with lower ranking husbands, who could never afford the house I had then, and nobody every told me I didn't deserve my house. Nobody ever wished ill on me just because I had a house big enough for my family in a neighborhood I could feel good about living in. People just accepted, "Thak has enough rank to get that for Anna." and that was that.

So why are the wives here so mean? I have had people tell me it's unfair that I have my house, that I did nothing to deserve it because I didn't earn Thak's rank, and I've even had some really foul women tell me that I would "get the wake-up call of my life someday and not be able to afford that anymore". Really? In what world is it ok to wish ill on somebody just because they have a house they like? It's not ok.

I always try to be encouraging of people on their house hunts because so many people are so negative about it. I have to try to show the other side. It wasn't bad for us, and I always tell people how we found our house, and assure them that they will find a house, too. Do I mean a lower-enlisted wife will get a house like mine? No. I don't mean that at all. I mean she will have somewhere to live, just like I had when I was a brand new Sergeant's wife. No, I have absolutely no idea what it's like to raise a family on Private's pay, and I never will, but I do know that I've yet to meet a military family who's homeless, and that it is absolutely true that everybody finds a place to live some way.

This may be one of the byproducts of the Army's insistence that families have no rank. It results in a lot of confusion when someone thinks her husband ought to be able to get her what some other wife has... only not to consider that the other wife's husband has been in the Army for 4x as long as hers, and gets paid a bit better. In this way, I see how lucky I am to have been a soldier first. From day one of my enlistment, I knew that I wouldn't have as nice of things as my superiors had, but that I could have those things one day if I worked hard and earned as much rank as they had. It was easy to translate that to my role as a wife after I got out. It didn't shock me that the Sergeant Major's wife drove a Lexus while Thak and I shared my Pontiac. I didn't care that the Sergeant First Class' wife had a 3 BR house despite having no children while I had a 2 BR. These things were obvious to me. It would have been weird if they lived like I lived at the time even though their husbands out ranked mine. I just wish others would give me the courtesy that was so obvious for me to give to the wives who were senior to me back then.

As a final thought, I really do promise you will find a house. No, the big adobe in my neighborhood won't be it (I can't think of affording that one either!) but you will find somewhere to live, and it will be ok. I guarantee it beyond a shadow of a doubt.