Dereliction of Duty
MIlitary families housed in shocking conditions, silenced with shady legal tactics
Here’s an issue that makes my blood boil. And it pisses me off not merely because it is an unacceptable dishonor upon military members and their families, but because those entrusted to care for our families are actually the villains in this situation. And I reckon in this case, I am echoing popular sentiment.
As recently reported in military news outlets, there’s an unfolding scandal of substandard housing conditions across US military bases. Families living in houses overrun with black mold, raw sewage, and pest infestation, making them unlivable. These families have turned over their military housing allowance to private landlords who operate military housing complexes, those landlords have failed to provide habitable properties, and when the families have complained, they’ve been coerced, in exchange for remedial compensation from the landlord, into signing non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) forbidding them from speaking about the conditions they endured. A recent example of this chicanery can be reviewed here. Disgusting.
A little context. One of the lessons of the WWII mobilization of a 12-million strong military was that the services were unprepared to provide adequate support for the families who often came along. This was a drag on morale, retention, and combat focus.
In the Cold War decades which followed, military departments flush with generous budgets turned bases into self-contained villages, complete with housing areas, grocery stores, department stores, service stations, and other amenities. These things became expected fixtures of military family life.
But as the Cold War faded, things changed. Weapons became more expensive and the costs of elective wars skyrocketed, placing pressure on the other elements of military budgets. Calculator-wielding bureaucrats brainwashed by modernist management science looked for ways to turn inconvenient budget line items into profit centres. This money-grubbing birthed us the ugly baby known as Privatized Housing.
Under this lawful scam, servicemembers are paid a housing allowance and turn it over, penny for penny, to a private landlord who manages the base house they live in. This is the same house which would have been managed by a military organization previously, with no housing allowance paid or given. Military organizations made sure military families were supported, and the authority of the chain of command was the guarantee.
But bureaucrats theorized that housing management could be done better by private companies who specialized in it. At least this is what they said out loud. What they were really thinking was that they could sell off properties they’d rather not own, thereby releasing themselves from responsibility to maintain and pay taxes on them … while at the same time eliminating base support organizations. It was a double cost advantage.
Of course, what this really did was make housing maintenance the responsibility of the servicemember; something they pay for with their housing allowance, removing military commanders from the loop. The Department of Defense (DoD) sold properties to private corporations and then handed them a guaranteed revenue stream in the form of housing allowance. All they had to do was be minimally decent landlords.
But they’re not, as it turns out. Each of the three major real estate corporations who bought up military housing contracts have since been accused of failing to provide proper upkeep, failing to respond in a reasonable manner to tenant complaints, and using NDAs to conceal the shocking conditions they’ve permitted to take root, as well as the paltry settlements they’ve paid as hush money to wronged tenants in protection of their continued revenues. The US Senate has started to complain about this to DoD and demand accountability, but it’s been an acknowledged problem for years and everyone is pretending it’s new while doing not nearly enough about it.
Couple of thoughts about why this is an especially dark episode.
First, it is absolutely heart-breaking. Servicemembers have a deeply ingrained sense of duty. They bring their families along on a journey that they know will create trials, separations, and instability which are part of the territory. This makes them especially sensitive about ensuring their families are well cared for and situated. Not only so they can deploy overseas knowing they’ve done right by their loved ones, but so they can focus on their own jobs knowing family are all good. It will have been absolutely shattering to the consciences of the involved servicemembers to realize they’ve put their families into subpar quarters. And doubly so feeling they trusted their command in doing so.
Second is the absolute and unforgivable cynicism of these companies using NDAs. This is a legal device intended to protect confidential or not generally knowable information which is sensitive to the parties. NDAs are not intended to silence parties in a property settlement arising from habitability complaints. They’re not intended to be so broad as limit the free expression of the parties on matters which are not confidential or sensitive. And they’re not valid if they make unlawful requests of the parties, like staying quiet about potential health and safety risks in properties being managed by a bad landlord which might impact others. In the particular case of the DoD housing-related matters, NDAs cannot impair the rights of tenants under federal law, which include the right to complain openly about substandard conditions in privatized housing.
It’s likely courts would find these NDAs unlawful if ever they were tested. But these are not people with the money lying around to file civil suits to fight these processes. They are people of modest means. They are vulnerable and lack bargaining power. So in most cases, they take the paltry scraps offered them and move on, suffering indignities they should be free from in the kind of environment DoD should be providing.
And this is the final thought I have on the matter. DoD knew this would happen. None of this is surprising. We all saw it coming. Turn over the wellbeing of your people on something as important as housing to profit-motivated private corporations with boards and shareholders, and you are inviting the abuse of your people. These companies would cut corners and skimp and reduce costs in their business model in ways subtle and insidious, coming as close as possible to a legal boundary as possible without violating it. This was utterly predictable. And since it was predictable, there was a duty to predict, prevent, and react to it.
Where is the DoD audit mechanism for these properties? Where is the command involvement? In the case linked above, a soldier family at Fort Belvoir is being notoriously and flagrantly clowned by the landlord. Why is no one having to pull the Garrison Commander off the landlord’s local representative to prevent him scraping out someone’s guts with his bare hands? Where is Lloyd Austin in all of this? What good is all that power and authority if you’re not going to use it to take care of people?
Cutting budgets is not free. There is a cost somewhere to something impacting someone. DoD knew it was placing families at risk when it privatized housing, and it now feigns shock when it clearly never installed even the most modest safeguards and audits to protect its people. The Senate is no better. It colluded passively by letting people budgets atrophy and actively by legislating privatization of people services.
Leadership is responsibility for people. When you’re too distant from or aloof to their problems, you will come up short. When you know coming up short is likely and you do nothing to prevent it, you’re derelict. How these people sleep at night is beyond me.
Here’s some examples of the kind of housing being provided to the families of those willing to fight and die on our behalf.
TC is an American veteran passionate about proper support to veterans and their families. He writes from his home in the UK.