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KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. - Fluctuating Base Allowance for Housing rates can get people down. No one more than John Kirk of the Kirtland Military Housing Office, who collects data each year on housing and rental costs in the greater Albuquerque area.
He leads the effort to look at hundreds of properties and determine what costs should be for each category, from one bedroom apartments to five-bedroom single family homes.
“The Housing Office gathers data to reflect the actual housing costs and then we report that up to [Robert D. Niehaus, Inc.] and RDN puts it in their black box—they have a number of equations they are looking at—and they come out with suggested BAH rates for the next year for the DoD,” Kirk said.
The Niehaus firm has a contract with the DoD to collect data on housing costs and recommend new rates each year.
During the survey process, Kirk said they are looking at only suitable housing.
“A lot of people are concerned that there are a lot of places outside the fence that are less than attractive [to potential renters],” Kirk said. “In fact, 53.8 percent of the metro area is excluded from our survey because it doesn’t meet standards for suitable housing for military personnel.”
If a property does not meet standards for square footage per bedroom, community amenities, age limits for the structure and the infrastructure (plumbing, electrical, etc.), it is not considered in the survey. Kirk said he lives in an area that is excluded.
“I love my house in the Northeast Heights, but the area isn’t eligible because of the age of the homes,” Kirk said.
While Kirk and the housing team provide thorough information on only suitable housing collected over a four-month period--and visit more than 300 properties--the end results can vary.
After the local housing market rose in terms of home prices and rental costs in 2016, RDN, the Pentagon and ultimately, Congress, adjusted the Kirtland/Albuquerque-area BAH rates to the tune of a nearly-seven percent decrease.
“We ended up red in every category but E-5 with dependents and E-6 with dependents. The average decrease was 6.84 percent,” Kirk said.
The bump in the local housing market may not have been reflected until this year, when January 2018 BAH rates went up an average of seven percent across all categories.
Still, what housing officials term a “sine wave” of up-and-down changes to the rate can be observed looking at rates across almost any multi-year period, Kirk explained. The Kirtland/ABQ-area rates rose in 2015 and 2016 after seeing a net decrease in 2014.
”I blame it on that black box,” Kirk joked. Still, he takes it hard when in a year when the rate is reduced. As a U.S. Army Soldier in the 1980s, Kirk remembers a time when his fellow troops lived on food stamps in expensive California locales with no base housing available.
| Date Taken: | 11.19.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 11.19.2018 10:34 |
| Story ID: | 300470 |
| Location: | KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, NEW MEXICO, US |
| Web Views: | 90 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, BAH-rate data based on hundreds of local properties, by James Fisher, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
