Housing allowance cuts, and you.

As I said before, even though there was a cut in housing allowance for Thak's rank and this post, we will not take the decrease personally since there is an Individual Rate Protection clause which locks us in at the drastically higher 2010 rate since we're already here and receiving it. It is for our inbound peers that this really sucks, so many of us have raised this concern to our Garrison Commander since we don't want our fellow E6 wives to have to struggle the way most of us did prior to 2010 when the rates went up to what they are now. By making the 2011 rates basically equivalent of the 2009 rates, they have really screwed a lot of people.

Initially, our Garrison Commander was very supportive, and said he understood, and had already resubmitted it to DOD for a review. Awesome. That's all we can ask of him. As of yesterday, he said that those lower ranking than us were really the ones getting too little (Even though their rates actually went up slightly?!) and we were actually fine. Granted, we are getting more than they are, but for how long most of our husbands have served, we should get more! We shouldn't have to resort to living in apartments, or bad neighborhoods, or remote suburbs. No, at this rank,we shouldn't. My husband, for one, has served EIGHTEEN YEARS. For that, he has absolutely earned the right to get us a HOUSE where we don't have to share walls with strangers, and that is located close enough to post that he can eat every meal at home, and that is in a safe enough neighborhood that our kids can play outside without a care in the world. This is not unreasonable, and with how much rents have risen here in the past year, our inbound peers will not be able to afford this, and that is not right! We will keep our house. Those inbound will not get anything this good unless they pay a ton of money out of pocket. It was not right to slash the housing allowance on this rank. Oh, and ONLY this rank. It was an absolutely atrocious choice, to be perfectly frank... of course, I didn't tell the Colonel that.

This has caused many conversations in the week or so since the new rate chart came out, and something occurred to me. People who have always gotten their money's worth out of post housing should never give commentary on off post issues. There's this one First Sergeant's wife who really irritates me. No, not the one from before who told the lower-enlisted wife "tisk tisk tisk". No, this one isn't THAT bad, but pretty close. For doing 23 years of Army, she surely doesn't have a clue about off post living because for EVERY SINGLE ONE of those 23 years, she lived on post. What's more, she's always gotten her money's worth. She had her first baby when her husband was an E1, and by the time he made Sergeant, they had 4. They have 6 now. So basically, someone with that many kids, and starting at that low of a rank, has NO IDEA what it's like to be in a position of getting royally ripped off by the post housing contractor if you get on the list. Trust me, post housing is a very different proposition for someone who's going to get a 4 BR, regardless of rank, than it is for someone who's going to pay more than any of their neighbors, and probably get a 2 BR. You know, technically, this idiot housing contractor we have here (I say that because we dealt with these jackasses at Ft. Stewart, too) could give me and Thak a 2 BR if we got on the list. They also COULD shove us in with the lower-enlisteds still because they just flung the rank restriction wide open on like half the housing areas here. So basically, me and Thak are people who have been responsible about our number of children, and we would get royally screwed by every housing contractor on the planet because of it, while people like this 1SG wife, who just reproduced to her little heart's content from the rank of E1 get anything and everything. Any housing contractor will freely tell you that the reason they can give low ranking people big houses is because some higher ranking people can be placed in smaller houses than they are paying for, so that's why it is really bad for me and Thak to live on post. We HATE picking up the tab for PVT's who can't seem to master birth control. So basically, people who have only stood on the side of the fence of having their tab picked up, cannot really speak on off post issues, or of post housing fairness, because they obviously think on post living is the greatest deal going, since it has been for them. These people never see the other side, while those of us who have been on the more rank/fewer kids side of the fence, see clearly how vital it is to have off post living be a viable option for people, especially in today's world of privatized housing where it really doesn't save the Army any money at all to have soldiers live on post.

I also think the entire housing system needs a revamp, and fast. The old system that we are on now, and I just learned this yesterday from our Garrison Commander, is made to pay only 80% of the cost of living off post. Really? I see what they're trying to do with that. They're trying to make it more attractive for soldiers to live on post, because before housing was privatized, that saved the army billions a year because people were renting from the Army instead of the Army dishing out money every month for people to pay their landlords. Now that housing is privatized, though, the same amount of money goes out each month regardless of where soldiers live. It's as if 100% of soldiers live off post, in a financial sense.

What's more, this system doesn't work anymore. Lower-enlisted soldiers no longer need Commander approval to marry, so they marry in droves. Recruiters are instructed to enlist people no matter if they have dependents or not, and so we have people enlisting who already have families. With the enlistment age cutoff raised to the mid 40's, we have flung open the door to hoards of enlistees who will need more than a barracks room. Even ROTC programs are allowing cadets with dependents, which is a change within the past five years. You didn't used to see many married Second Lieutenants, but you see tons now. The number of soldiers with dependents has skyrocketed in the past decade, hence, the need for post housing has grown far faster than the Army can keep up with it, so a lot of people have to live off post. The majority of people at this post live off post for a year or more before coming up on the list for post housing, so basically, when they finally do come up on the list, they will have to break their lease (which is difficult), lose all their deposits (and around here, deposits are exorbitant! We paid about $1600 in deposits to our landlord alone when we moved in here, and they said explicitly, "You don't get this back if you move on post."), and move at their own expense.

This all seems pretty fair until you consider that the housing allowance is designed to pay only 80% of living expenses on the local economy. What I see there is that the soldier is being penalized for the Army's inability to provide housing for everyone. Now, I'm also not implying that providing housing for 100% of personnel would ever be feasible, because it's not. The issue, though, is that this system is antiquated, and would only have worked during the times when there were so few married soldiers that the Army really could realistically provide housing on post for all but a few. Those days have come and gone, and in today's world, it makes sense for it to be a viable and sustainable choice to live off post, because, simply, on post isn't going to be an option for a ton of people, not to mention, while the system thrives on people like me and Thak getting less than we pay for from the post housing contractor, there's really not much that would make that an attractive option for people like us. I guess if they want to decrease the number of soldiers (and they do. Thak's quota took a nosedive this year!) screwing over middle ranked NCO's is one way to do it, although making cuts of direct supervisory level leaders is a strange way to go about it.