Military families across the nation are subjected to disgusting housing conditions, military wives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

• Families say their military homes are infested with rodents, roaches and horrifying amounts of mold, polling shows.

   

• “It’s just such an embarrassment how no one is coming forward to really be a hero and help these families, for military families,” one military wife said. 

Housing companies subject military families to serious illness by purposefully covering up unsanitary housing conditions, military wives say.

Military Matters Foundation founders JoAnne Mantz and Janna Driver provided the Daily Caller News Foundation with exclusive polling and photographs and said that military families are subjected to mold-ridden homes that seriously impact the health of both their families and their husbands who serve in the Armed Forces. Mantz’s husband retired from the U.S. Navy Sunday, while Driver’s husband retired from the U.S. Air Force in March.

Mantz and Driver told the DCNF that housing companies say they are not aware of the serious issues with military homes but paper over mold and subject families to extraneous charges instead of remedying the problems.

Both Mantz and Driver lived on military bases with their families, with Mantz in Newport, Rhode Island, from 2015 to 2018 and Driver in Oklahoma from 2017 until 2018. Both women said doctors confirmed to them that they and their families suffered from illness brought on by the conditions of their former military homes.

“The conception in the public is that you live for free,” Mantz said, referring to military families on base. “No, they don’t live for free. They’re paying to be in these houses. Their landlord is their boss. They cannot get out of the leases. Their pay for these housing goes directly to the housing company so they can’t even stop the payments to the houses. I mean they’re young and you’re just stuck in the middle and sick.”

Servicemen who live on Oklahoma bases pay about $1,400 a month for affordable homes on military bases considered safer than the areas surrounding the bases, Driver said.  Entry-level airman basic (Air Force), private (Army-Marine Corps), seaman recruit (Navy) service members often make as little as $20,172 a year.

Polling Shows ‘Telling’ Conditions In Military Homes

Driver and Mantz worked with Hayward Score, a group devoted to helping resolve unsanitary conditions in military housing, to publish a housing survey in November. The survey, conducted in 2018 and 2019, focused on the home and medical issues of families living in military housing.

“The data compiled from thousands of families regarding their situation and health effects is telling,” Mantz wrote in an email to the DCNF. “One thing we can say is a constant, thousands of families are suffering health-wise, with many of the same symptoms, that go away when they leave the home. That speaks volumes.”

The group polled 984 military respondents on over 75 bases nationwide. The polling found 68% of respondents reported odors, 62% reported leaks, 37% reported severe leaks and 33% reported poor maintenance. Seventy-eight percent reported excess dust, 41% reported water stains and visible mold, and 56% reported roaches or mice.

Seventy-five percent of respondents who reported symptoms of illness said that these symptoms stopped when they left the house, indicating, according to Hayward, that the house “is the problem.” These symptoms include increased allergies, sinus congestion, coughing, frequent headaches, feeling sick, sleep disturbance, extreme fatigue, mood changes, trouble sleeping, foggy thinking, feeling depressed, short-term memory, vertigo and heart palpitations.

The poll also found that visits to specialist doctors are high among military families and military insurance spending is high. The poll has a margin of plus or minus 3% on military data and plus or minus 4% on medical related data.

Another intake survey, that the Military Matters Foundation (MMF) has families take who wish for help from the organization, shows the age groups of people affected health-wise by their military home. Respondents were mostly members of Navy, Air Force or Army families, and the survey found that children aged 1 to 5 were most strongly impacted health-wise by the conditions in the homes.

How It Works

Every two to three years, military families experience a permanent change of station (PCS) and a new family will move into the home, Mantz and Driver said. By the time the new family moves in, the housing companies have covered up walls with a fresh coat of paint — despite “mold or things growing through walls,” Driver said.

“The next family doesn’t know that there is mold coming through the walls and then everybody gets sick,” Mantz said. “Then they all get sick and they don’t realize the symptoms are from the house making them sick.”

The MMF founders provided the DCNF with photographs showing large amounts of black mold seeping through walls and covering floors in homes on Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. Driver said that one photo, showing a decrepit bathtub, is from Robins Air Force Base in Georgia.

Mold has been linked to the development of asthma in some children, as well as upper respiratory tract symptoms, nasal stuffiness, throat irritation, coughing or wheezing, eye irritation, and in some cases, skin irritation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC warns that mold must be removed as soon as possible from homes as it may cause health risks. Patients who have suffered from exposure to mold have said they suffer from anxiety, depression and confusion.

The Driver And Mantz Families Suffer From Their Military Homes

Both women also said they suffered from serious health issues stemming from the conditions in their former homes. Mantz suffered from liver issues and Farmer’s Lung, and Driver said her family of seven children suffered from continuous viruses the entire time they lived in their military home.

Driver’s family moved into their Oklahoma military home in June 2017. They moved to a hotel in August 2018, then moved for a month to a Tinker Air Face Base “Patriot home” — a vacant home on base that the military uses to house families while their home is being remediated, according to Driver.

But Driver said this home was also full of mold, and her family became even sicker. From here, the Driver family again moved to a hotel for two months where the military paid for their rooms one night at a time.

“So each morning it was a battle with them and we never knew where we were going to be the next night until they finally paid for weeks at a time while they remediate,” Driver said. “We caught them doing multiple air tests but we were finally given a clearance test where Stachybotrys was found in a bedroom.”

One night while the family was living in the hotel in November 2018, Driver drove behind a military maintenance building and found her family’s belongings stuffed in a garbage bin, she said.

Driver said the housing company Balfour Beatty put out the painted sign in the photo that says “do not use.” She does not know whether Balfour Beatty intended to throw out their belongings or stow them.

“It was heartbreaking to look in it and see the tooth fairy pillows my late grandmother had made for my kids and their little shoes and everything we had accumulated over our lifetime,” she said. “It was so sad.”

The family declined to take their military base home back in November 2018.

In regular housing situations, families can reach out to their landlords to remove mold or fix housing issues. But military families often cannot do this because their landlord is often their husband’s boss, Mantz said. Their boss may not have the tools to help them or get irritated and will not wish to be involved. Some bosses tell their husbands that wives need to take posts off Facebook about their houses.

“It is also a federal land issue,” Mantz added. “So in most cases state and local laws don’t apply. You can’t call the health department to come in — they won’t even touch it because we’re on federal land.”

Maintenance workers are incentivized with pay and bonuses from taxpayer money to close work orders in a timely fashion, Driver and Mantz said, adding that the maintenance workers will close out work orders without actually fixing the problems in order to get paid more.

“Our air conditioner went out in June and they came out looked at it, closed the work order, but didn’t fix it. We went without air conditioning for about two weeks in July in Oklahoma in 110-degree weather with little bitty kids,” Driver said. “And this happens all over.”

On one occasion, a maintenance worker came to Driver’s Oklahoma military base home in 2018 to fix a leak in their home. Driver said she had already noticed dark spots on the walls coming through their maintenance closet, which the family could not access, and the wall of this closet adjoined the room in which their 4-year-old twins played all day.