NEW YORK: Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic lawmakers on Friday proposed a bill that offers new protections for US military families facing unsafe housing, following a series of Reuters reports revealing squalid conditions in privately managed base homes.
The Reuters reports and later Congressional hearings detailed widespread hazards including lead paint exposure, vermin infestations, collapsing ceilings, mould and maintenance lapses in privatised base housing communities that serve some 700,000 US military family members.
The bill from the Massachusetts Democrat who seeking her party’s nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, would mandate both regular and unannounced spot inspections of base homes by certified, independent inspectors. It would also hold landlords accountable for quickly fixing hazards.
The military’s privatisation programme for years allowed real estate firms to operate base housing with scant oversight, Reuters found, leaving some tenants in unsafe homes with little recourse against landlords.
The bill would also require the Department of Defence and its private housing operators to publish reports annually detailing housing conditions, tenant complaints, maintenance response times and the financial incentives companies receive at each base. The provisions aim to enhance transparency of housing deals whose finances and operations the military had allowed to remain largely confidential under a privatisation programme since the late 1990s.
The measure would also require private landlords to cover moving costs for at-risk families, and healthcare costs for people with medical conditions resulting from unsafe base housing, ensuring they receive continuing coverage even after they leave the homes or the military.
“This bill will eliminate the kind of corner-cutting and neglect the Defence Department should never have let these private housing partners get away with in the first place,” Warren said in a statement on Friday.
The proposed legislation comes after February Senate hearings where Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, slammed private real estate firms for endangering service families, and sought answers about why military branches were not providing more oversight. — Reuters
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