Families living at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington have dealt with issues like mold and rodents in their homes. Still, monthslong waitlists exist for housing on base as some families struggle to find somewhere to live nearby. Kaylee Tornay is an investigative reporter with InvestigateWest, a nonprofit news outlet covering the Pacific Northwest. She’s covered these issues for the outlet and joins us with details of her reporting.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2019, Congress and the Department of Defense adopted reforms after getting years of reports of unsafe housing conditions on US military bases – everything from mold, and rodents, to leaky roofs. But new reporting by InvestigateWest has found that these reforms have fallen short. Investigative reporter Kaylee Tornay has talked to ten families at the sprawling Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington and she joins us now. Welcome back to Think Out Loud.
Kaylee Tornay: Hey Dave, thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.
Miller: So I wanna start with what led to the attempted reforms, a Tenant Bill of Rights. What prompted Congress and the Department of Defense to enact these reforms?
Tornay: Yeah. So one of the main, sort of catalysts was this really extensive reporting in 2018 and 2019 from Reuters, where they really explored some of these most egregious issues around lead exposure, asbestos exposure, and particularly with one of these companies, an issue where they were fraudulently completing these work orders. That actually ended up leading to criminal charges for the company, multi-billion dollar fines. It caught a lot of attention at that point – the state of housing, and the real toll that that was taking on health and safety for these families.
Miller: So members of Congress and the Pentagon, they were alarmed and they eventually enacted the Tenant Bill of Rights. What are the rights? I mean, what’s supposed to be guaranteed?
Tornay: Basically, the Tenant Bill of Rights is supposed to be a document that spells out rights for tenants and pathways to resolve issues when tenants feel that those rights are being violated. It was implemented by the DOD in 2021 and these private housing companies that manage military housing on domestic bases, kind of all-- But I think there’s maybe a few that have said at this point they’re not fully implemented, but the majority of them said, “Yes, we’re fully implementing these rights.”
It is 18 different rights that are essentially meant to ensure that these tenants have access to stable, safe, reliable housing, and that they know what they’re getting into before they rent a unit, through means like a seven-year maintenance history. And also that they have a process that they can turn to through a dispute resolution process to try to have issues addressed when they arise. That’s basically kind of what that document is supposed to do, sort of enshrined rights of tenants to get advanced notice before maintenance personnel and enter their homes. Basically, [it] kind of covers all bases in terms of before they move in, while they’re living there, and when they move out, that everything is fair and safe.
Miller: This went into effect two years ago or so. And it was supposed to just empower military families who live on domestic bases and encounter problems. But as you found,
it’s often not working as intended. Can you tell us about Amanda Klinksiek’s experience?
Tornay: Yeah, absolutely. It’s important to note, even before getting into that, that this Tenant Bill of Rights is still not something that all residents even know about. They don’t often even feel well-versed in what those rights are. And so that’s obviously a problem with trying to fight for those rights in the first place. So, that in itself – the education piece – continues to be an ongoing issue even almost two years after this went into effect.
In Amanda’s case, she’s one of those residents who was informed, informed herself, knows what her rights are, tries to assert them. She really found that there were instances where she was really struggling to have those rights upheld. She told me about multiple different times that she said Liberty staff – and Liberty is the housing company that manages on-base housing at JBLM [Joint Base Lewis-McChord] – Amanda told me there were multiple times that maintenance staff came and accessed their home without giving prior notice. They actually – when you go and visit their house, they have a sign on the front, a little taped note that says, “Liberty staff, call before entry, here’s the phone number,” something to that effect.
They really have struggled with mold. She has said that there were things that she’s discovered, in terms of remediation, that’s gone on in the house that she says were not in the seven-year work history that her family had a chance to review before they moved in as is their right under the Tenant Bill of Rights. So, she’s raised questions about whether those work histories are really, completely – serve as a complete picture for kinds of health concerns that a family might want to know about before moving into a unit. She says if she had known that there was mold remediation or holes, an issue in the roof beforehand, that she and her family would not have moved in, because she has a severe mold allergy. When mold has turned up in their townhouse, she has gotten hives. It really has affected her health.
She’s tried to work with even the military tenant advocate – that’s another thing that was an invention of the Tenant Bill of Rights, is the guarantee to access to a military tenant advocate through the housing management office at each installation. And she says that that really hasn’t provided much help for her. So those are just some of the samples that her experience kind of shows the weaknesses in the actual implementation of the Tenant Bill of Rights, because she says she still has to file multiple maintenance requests, follow up a bunch of times. And that the mold remediation really isn’t up to the standards that she knows it would take to kind of ease her worries about it growing back basically and remaining sort of present in the home.
Miller: What kinds of issues did you hear from other on-base residents?
Tornay: It really can run a gamut. Definitely talked to some people who had dealt with rodent issues. One of the folks that we spoke to, for example, Hailey Davis, she had kind of alerted Liberty when she moved into her home, that she noticed that there were some cracks and just unsealed areas in her home, that she was worried about rodent access to the home. And she said that she was told that those were just the result of foundations settling, that there was not really anything to worry about. A few months ago, she started discovering mouse poop around the house. Well, she saw a live mouse on her kitchen counter, she said. Since then, she’s been trying to get – she was trying for a while to get pest control out for help managing this. She was finding mouse poop in her two-year-old daughter’s play kitchen while she was waiting. So, just trouble having that issue be addressed in a timely manner.
Other people told us about their concerns about the water – the water is managed by a different contractor than the housing company. But it certainly falls kind of under that category of health and safety concerns. One of them shared with me videos that she took of really brown water flowing out of her kitchen tap. Residents have been assured that that water is safe to drink, safe to use – but of course, that doesn’t really ease their minds all that much, having brown water coming out of their kitchen sinks.
Miller: What response did you get from Liberty Military Housing? And actually, they’re one of just a handful of companies around the country that own and manage these properties, sort of for the Department of Defense, these on-base properties. What did they tell you when you brought these various residents’ concerns to their attention?
Tornay: Liberty really responded to us mostly with a, kind of a statement about how they’re fully committed to ensuring the residents live in a safe and healthy environment, and that their communities provide a safe and comfortable living experience for all of their residents. They also pointed us to sort of their internal process of different managers that they are asking residents to escalate their concerns to before approaching anything like this dispute resolution process that’s outlined in the Tenant Bill of Rights. They also kind of pointed to their commitment to different reforms like the seven-year maintenance history. They said that that provides unprecedented transparency to service members when deciding where to live. But the – largely, that was sort of the statement that we got from them.
Miller: Well, how much leverage do on-base residents have? How many options do they have?
Tornay: That actually can be kind of one of the issues is that there [are] various sorts of channels that people can go through. And so I don’t – they all sort of reported different methods to me. One person would just keep filing maintenance requests through Liberty’s app. Another person would try to call the district office and then escalate up through the managers, which Liberty says that those are the steps that they expect people to take, and that they want people to take, and they try to let people know that they should take. Another person reaches out to maybe their soldiers’ chain of command and asked them to get involved to advocate for them. Some people found a little bit of help that way and other people really didn’t. There’s also going right to the military tenant advocate on base and some people went that route really early.
So there are a variety of channels. There’s also this thing called an ICE [Interactive Customer Evaluation] complaint, is just sort of another general process, it isn’t really specifically geared toward housing. Other people went to the Government Accountability Office of Inspector General when they felt like they weren’t getting action and weren’t getting response from on-base resources.
So, there really are a lot of paths. That kind of contributes, I think, to how confusing and just kind of how people don’t always get the results that they are looking for, because they don’t always know what the best process is and what the prescribed process is. And other people try to use that process and still feel like they’re not getting their needs addressed.
Miller: And that gets us back to the education piece you said earlier, that to a great extent, the broad strokes – or let alone the details – of the Tenant Bill of Rights seems not really clearly been explained, or posted, or brought to people who live on base. What about housing options off base? To what extent are those available, or an option?
Tornay: JBLM is about ten miles south of Tacoma. Tacoma is not a cheap area to be looking for housing. Certainly, Washington is not an easy place when it comes to cost of living. That in itself leaves some of these families who are maybe lower ranking, enlisted families, with some of the fewest options around. People can’t always afford to have an hour-long commute each way if they choose a smaller town that’s a little further outside of the area. Those are the families who often feel like they have really no other option but to wait for on-base housing.
And, as we kind of pointed out in our story, the demand for on-base housing is extremely high. There’s a very long waiting list for most, if not all, of these communities. The office sends out updates each month of like, “OK, as of June 28th, here’s what the wait time is for each specific community,” and some of them are literally a year. So that really kind of goes to show you that there’s not a lot of options for families in the community. Largely because, in Washington and in the Tacoma area, housing is very expensive. I was looking at median rent for a two bedroom apartment, which could be good if someone has a small family. But if you have more children, you definitely would need more than a two bedroom, and that can be $1,700 a month. On-base housing, they’ll take your basic housing allowance and that can just be more affordable for people. So that’s kind of the option that they, the only option they really have.
Miller: I wanna go back to the beginning. We mentioned that Congress, in a defense authorization in a big budget bill, paved the way for the Senate Bill of Rights that has now been implemented. What have members of Congress said about the situation now?
Tornay: They’ve continued to kind of write letters, have hearings. They’ve invited families to come speak to certain committees, like the Armed Services Committees. So they have continued to listen and continue to sort of write letters to Department of Defense leadership saying, “Look, this is not meant to be an optional thing. Compliance with the Tenant Bill of Rights is not meant to be optional. We expect you to hold the housing companies accountable.” It’s a really complicated thing. Everyone will kind of tell you about the fact that these contracts that the DOD has with these housing companies – they’re very long, they’re like 50-year contracts that were signed in the 90s. Both parties have to agree to reopen and negotiate any terms of those contracts. And so, there’s that aspect, that logistically it’s complicated. The Tenant Bill of Rights didn’t come with any sort of consequences for the contracted housing companies if they don’t adhere to them.
So, Congress has really, I think, been urging, and the military housing advocates as well, have been really pushing for even sort of a mindset change, a culture shift of – while the housing companies are important partners for the Department of Defense, there also needs to be a mindset of accountability. And so far, that’s largely what I’ve sort of observed in my research. And then, there’s also some talks about how to take concrete actions to just empower the DOD more as well, to advocate on behalf of families.
Miller: Kaylee, thanks very much.
Tornay: Thank you.
Miller: Kaylee Tornay is an investigative reporter with InvestigateWest. She recently reported on ongoing problems for residents at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, despite the Tenant Bill of Rights that was enacted just a couple years ago.
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