Forum: Air Force Life

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_ ... ed100.html

From San Antonio Express-News 08-10-2008

Base's housing privatized

Guillermo Contreras - Express-News The corner of Blake Road and Laverne Loop at Lackland AFB is a snapshot of how the Department of Defense envisions the digs for its military members.

The houses at Frank Tejeda Estates East, with brick facades and green lawns, line clean streets — like a development straight out of “Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.”

The Pentagon chose Lackland a decade ago for the first on-base privatized housing project to move service members out of worn government dwellings. Lackland followed the first off-base privatization at Ingleside, near Corpus Christi.

Lackland's project contributed to a base citation, noted in Business Week in December, that named it the eighth best place in the country to raise a child.

Privatization is a shortcut to solving a housing crisis that Pentagon leaders consider a major quality-of-life issue, and a measure to help retain service members.

The Military Family Housing Act of 1996 lets the military cut real-estate deals with developers to finance, design, construct, own, operate and maintain homes on or off base for service members with families. The developers own the housing projects for 50 years and are allowed to lease the units to service members at rents that do not exceed the housing allowances issued by the military.

In late 1998, the Landmark Organization of Austin, now known as FaulknerUSA, got the nod to build Frank Tejeda Estates, which has 420 homes on the base's main grounds and Lackland's Medina base annex. With its partner, Realm Group in Austin, Faulkner completed the privatization project — known as Lackland I — in 2000 at a cost of $42.6 million.

At Lackland, if housing occupancy rates fall below 95 percent, the developer has the right to open the units to other tenants: single Air Force members, other active-duty members and their families, guard and reserve members, federal civil service employees, retired military members, retired federal civil service, Defense Department contractors or employees and the general public — in that order.

Unlike several other privatization projects, including some Navy installations near Corpus Christi that were knocked for their shortcomings in a congressional report in 2006, Lackland hasn't had a shortage of tenants.

“The people really like it. It's been a success,” said Ray Ranzau, privatization project manager at Lackland AFB. “Traditionally, we've had great occupancy.”

It's been so successful that FaulknerUSA — despite its much-publicized construction delays in erecting San Antonio's Grand Hyatt Hotel and setbacks in building a jail and sheriff's office in Cameron County that forced it to pay the county $12 million in a settlement in 2005 — was chosen this summer for a second round of privatization at Lackland, along with Realm Group.

Under Lackland II, the Air Force is working to hand over 264 homes to FaulknerUSA, which will demolish 163 houses and build 362 new ones.

In a section called North Skeet, bulldozers have cleared woodlands once contaminated with lead to make room for 220 of the new homes. By 2012, the base will have 883 total housing units less than 13 years old, with many averaging 2,200 square feet, Ranzau said.

Lackland II is just one of four new Air Force projects in Texas. Randolph AFB, Laughlin AFB in Del Rio and Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo are part of a six-base package deal inked in October 2007 that will put 2,503 homes under the control of Pinnacle AMS Development Co. LLC of Irvine, Calif., and Hunt Development Group of El Paso. Randolph's project alone is estimated to cost $24 million, Ian Smith, deputy of the Housing Privatization Program Office at Brooks City-Base's Air Force Center for Engineering and the Environment, said via e-mail.

“The (completed) privatization projects in Texas are performing as expected,” Smith's e-mail said. “The other projects are under construction and progressing according to plan.”

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On the other hand sometimes it doesn't work so well http://kingston.house.gov/News/Document ... ntID=87363

Forum: Air Force Life

Lackland base housing privatized