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Foreclosures Skyrocketing in Military Towns | Add Comment

    • Little wonder 8/7/2008
    Little wonder when the military is taking part in the housing bubble like the worst of them. They're systematically pushing out soldiers and their families out into off-base housing and then tearing down perfectly good housing. And that housings' replacement ISN'T a guaranteed deal. Here's the plan that affects my area (Travis AFB). http://jllpress.com/AMC_West/amc...t/ amc_west.html . Note that this particular plan is just three bases. This is happening at a lot more bases than those three. They divided up the contracts, presumably to make it easier to bid out. But it has the nice side effect of not having one enormous multi-billion (maybe even trillion) dollar boondoggle sticking out like a sore thumb in the defense budget. On my street and the few streets around me there are about a dozen underwater or empty homes. Four of those were enlisted families that PCS'ed out. Two managed to get renters (other enlisted families), but two are empty. Whether they're still somehow paying their $2-3000 mortgages or just abandoned them, I don't know yet. Now scale this up to two 100,000+ towns (Fairfield and Vacaville) and you can see this is a pretty nasty problem. Scale it up to all the bases and their surrounding metro areas and it's a really nasty problem. One last thing. The current standards for base house construction stink compared to what's being torn down. The newest houses on base (albeit NOT part of the AMC West plan) are literally made out of styrofoam. You have the frame and then these large panels of styrofoam nailed on the outside. Then they cover the foam with these thin strips of stucco cast (similar to what they used on broken limbs, but with stucco instead of plaster). You can break the stucco and dent the foam just by throwing a baseball at it!

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      • Little wonder cont.d 8/7/2008
      Let me explain "ISN'T guaranteed" a little further. The builder that was suppose to replace the torn down housing units for the privatization privateers hasn't been able to. Even doing a huge project for the US AIR FORCE they were unable to secure financing for months. They were suppose to start last year, but didn't for unannounced reasons. Then they were suppose to start at the beginning of this year but didn't, again for unannounced reasons. Then they were suppose to start in Q2, but didn't because of "market conditions." I asked an acquaintance who works on the periphery of our base's deal what "market conditions" meant on a government project. He told me the private builder was having a hard time securing financing, even with the backing of the USAF. A plan was finally inked about six weeks ago to carry forward, so they must have fixed the financing problem. However, to date there has been no effort at construction.

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