'Soldiers' Housing': Advocates fear effort will hurt poor civilians

WASHINGTON — Fort Drum soldiers who have been shut out of low-income housing will have a better chance of qualifying, if legislation proposed by Sen. Charles E. Schumer becomes law.

But some housing advocates question whether other low-income families will have a harder time finding housing as a result.

Mr. Schumer, D-N.Y., has proposed that soldiers' government-issued housing allowances be excluded from annual income so they can qualify for housing built through low-income tax credits.

About 3,000 families at Fort Drum would qualify, Mr. Schumer's office estimated. The senator and other supporters of the change say it will help ease the housing crunch brought on by Fort Drum's expansion.

"We need to remove the barriers that prevent our soldiers from accessing affordable housing," Mr. Schumer said in a press release. "Our service members and their families sacrifice so much to serve our country and in return we must serve them. The least we can do is make sure they have a roof over their head in the nation they fought to protect."

The legislation could also pit military families against civilian ones in competing for affordable housing — although lawmakers are pushing a provision to lessen that risk.

"One of the concerns on making soldiers eligible for low-income housing is that it might displace some people that are really low income," said Gary C. Beasley, acting executive director of Neighbors of Watertown, which owns and manages rental housing that qualifies for low-income tax credits.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition has expressed similar concerns, citing past efforts to exclude the basic allowance for housing from soldier's income. The organization has reservations about similar legislation in the House, said Linda Couch, vice president for policy.

If the military's housing allowance program works in areas where installations are expanding, Ms. Couch said, "private, non-subsidized developers will come in to meet that need."

Indeed, the Defense Department opposed legislation in 2006 to remove the BAH from income qualification for federal housing programs.

"Not counting the BAH might inappropriately stimulate the supply of subsidized housing, transfer existing scarce resources from low-income civilians to the military and conceivably generate ill-will among civilians toward the military," the department warned the U.S. Government Accountability Office at the time.

The problem in Northern New York is that housing construction, while growing, has not quite met the need of thousands of new Army families stationed in the area. Climbing rents alone have not attracted enough development, said Carl McLaughlin, executive director of the Fort Drum Regional Liaison Organization.

That organization supports the legislation.

If approved, the change would reduce soldiers' income by around $13,000 a year, for the program's purposes, Mr. McLaughlin said. That is the average amount soldiers receive in the BAH, which the Army has been increasing steadily in recent years to cover a greater percentage of soldiers' actual housing expense. The BAH rates have been rising particularly at Fort Drum, reflecting rising rents brought on by the increased demand for housing and climbing home energy expenses.

To stave off competition between military and non-military renters, lawmakers propose to scale back the program in a few years, by a making only new construction eligible for the BAH exclusion.

Mr. Beasley said, regardless of the legislation, he believes nonprofit housing organizations such as his can still take the BAH into account when considering military families' need relative to other applicants.

If one unit of affordable housing were available, and two families applied for it that were financially identical except that one was a military family and received a BAH, the agency could determine that the civilian family had a greater need for the available housing unit, Mr. Beasley said.

Mr. Schumer's legislation extends an experiment Congress tried in 2008 around nine military installations experiencing big increases in population as the Army expanded. None of those were in New York.

Times staff writer Joanna Richards contributed to this report.