Military Families Say Base Housing Is Plagued by Mold and Neglect

The private corporations that control almost all family housing on American military bases have every incentive to skimp on maintenance, critics say.


Sandy Gerber was excited when she and her husband, Scott Gerber, an Army colonel, moved into a stately house near the parade field at Fort Meade, Md. — their first on-base home since they were newlyweds in the mid-1990s.

“When you come in the Army, you think, ‘Oh wow, I hope someday I can live there,’” Mrs. Gerber said. “But for us, the problems started literally the day we walked in the door.”

A broken water line in the kitchen had flooded the house. Pulling up damaged linoleum flooring revealed rotting wood underneath. On rainy days, water streamed into every room. “And the smell of mold was overwhelming,” Mrs. Gerber said.

Liza Nunez and her husband, Alex Nunez, an Air Force master sergeant, found a foul, moldy smell in the master bedroom when they moved into a house in another section of Fort Meade. They were told it was drying paint, but the smell just got worse. And the water that later began to seep out of the ground like a moat around the house? “It was raw sewage,” Mrs. Nunez said.

Though the houses were in the middle of an Army base, the problems were not the Army’s responsibility to repair. And they were far from unique.

Like nearly all family housing on American military bases, these homes had been handed over by the Pentagon to a private contractor to manage and maintain for profit, under a program called the Military Housing Privatization Initiative that began in the 1990s. Some 207,000 housing units at bases across the country are now controlled by a handful of private corporations.

The privatization program has been plagued in recent years by widespread complaints about neglected or slipshod repairs, unsafe conditions and, especially, mold problems. Critics say that the program gives the corporations every incentive to skimp on maintenance, and that the armed services do too little to hold them accountable.

In a report in September, the Army said inspectors had visited 49 bases, and found that residents at 48 of them reported concerns over safety and environmental issues and had “some level of dissatisfaction” with their on-base housing. The top concerns were mold, lead-based paint, asbestos, poor water quality and exposure to sewage.

The issue gained wide public attention after Reuters began publishing a series of investigative articles on problems with base housing in August 2018. And it has been taken up in Congress, where committees of the House and Senate held hearings last week to question civilian and uniformed leaders of each military branch and top executives of five of the housing contractors about the program.

Military families who have struggled with maintenance issues and hazards in privatized base housing have also turned to the courts.

The Gerber and Nunez families, along with eight other military families who lived at Fort Meade around the same time, filed a lawsuit in November against Corvias Management, the company that has managed the privatized housing at the base since 2002. The suit accuses Corvias of breach of contract and negligence in maintaining the homes, leading to mold exposure and other health hazards; it asks for damages and a court order to force Corvias to put all the units it manages on the post in good repair. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status.

A spokeswoman for Corvias, Kelly Douglas, said in a statement that the company “disagrees with the allegations that have been made by the plaintiffs and will defend this lawsuit vigorously.”

“We are committed to the safe housing needs of military service members and their families, and will continue to provide dedicated service to our residents,” she said.

The Fort Meade suit is one of several recent legal actions by active-duty military families against base housing contractors, and they have had varying degrees of success. Claims of harm from environmental exposure to mold can be difficult to prove in court, but negligence and breach of contract claims have often been much easier to establish.

“What they really want is to ensure that what they went through doesn’t happen to the next family, and the family after that,” said Ben Block, a Washington lawyer and Army veteran who is representing the Fort Meade families pro bono. “These contractors made a deal to manage these houses and keep them habitable, and they need to honor that deal,” Mr. Block added.

The Military Housing Privatization Initiative was begun in the 1990s in part because the armed services had struggled for years to build and maintain adequate housing on their own. Under the program, the contractors purchased or simply assumed custody of existing base housing, began building new housing at their own expense, and signed 50-year leases on the land underneath.

To live in the privatized homes, service members sign over their entire tax-free housing allowance to the housing contractor in lieu of rent. Military families tend to relocate every few years as careers progress, so the housing units may turn over before maintenance issues are resolved. And the contractor has strong incentives not to hold units vacant for lengthy repairs or renovations: It can only collect revenue from occupied units, and cannot raise rents to recoup the cost of fixing them up.

The military is supposed to supervise the contractors and ensure they maintain standards, but the Army inspector general said in the September report that there was “general confusion and frustration” among base commanders over what level of oversight they were meant to exercise over the civilian contractors. The report cited conflicting guidance on the subject in official publications.

Members of the Senate committee pressed the uniformed and civilian service chiefs on the oversight question at the hearing last week.

“The military chain of command abdicated responsibility for this,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia.

“Assign somebody who’s in charge of this and hold them accountable,” added Senator Angus King, an independent of Maine.

Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois and a former Army pilot who was wounded in Iraq, said that base commanders’ yearly performance evaluations should be tied to housing conditions on the base. “I can’t find a single person who’s been fired over this,” Ms. Duckworth said.

The Army inspector general’s report pointed to several factors contributing to weak oversight, including 10 years of reduced budgets for military housing. The report said one large base, which it did not name, had three civilian employees overseeing 6,544 housing units.

This year’s military spending bill, which was approved by the House on Wednesday and is expected to pass the Senate in the next few days, includes several provisions meant to aid military families facing problems with privatized base housing. It directs each service to hire independent tenant advocates who can help resolve disputes; it requires the housing contractors to provide prospective tenants, before they move in, with information on any mold, lead contamination or rodent problems in the unit going back three years; and it calls for the creation of an electronic system for tenants to report problems and track repairs.

The Army inspector general found that some families who complained about conditions and requested repairs experienced retaliation from employees of housing contractors. In the House hearing, Representative Anthony Brown, whose Maryland district abuts Fort Meade, told the founder of Corvias, John Picerne, that some of his constituents had reported Corvias employees making obscene gestures at them, engaging in “drive-by harassment” and denying them requested repairs.

Mrs. Douglas, the Corvias spokeswoman, called the allegations “very serious” and said the company was looking into them. “We have no tolerance for any behavior that does not live up to our high standard,” she said.

She said the company was investing in housing at Fort Meade, with plans to build more than 250 new homes and to replace about 2,000 heating and cooling units in existing homes.

Mr. Block, the lawyer representing the Gerbers, the Nunezes and the other Fort Meade families, said one of their chief concerns was that the severe mold exposure their children experienced will leave them with lifelong health problems — problems that could medically disqualify them from enlisting in the future.

“When the first thing they say is, they’re worried that their son or daughter won’t be able to join up because they got asthma, because of the house they lived in on post, I mean—” Mr. Block said, trailing off. “We’ve got fewer and fewer people willing to sign up and do their part for the greater good, and we should be taking better care of them.”