Military Housing, rentals, home buying, real estate, VA home loans - Marine Corps Times

Single doesn’t mean fewer expenses

Alaska has some of the highest rent districts in the country, but the money available to soldiers for housing there is still not quite enough for Army Sgt. Romesa Fantroy.

Fantroy, 24, lives alone in a modest two-bedroom apartment near Fort Richardson in Anchorage, for which she pays $1,100 a month.

The barracks at Fort Richardson, where she works in the 25th Infantry Division’s 725th Support Battalion, are packed, making soldiers at her paygrade of E-5 and above eligible to live off post and draw Basic Allowance for Housing.

“I can’t even fit all the stuff I have in those barracks rooms anyway,” said Fantroy, who returned from a second Iraq tour in December and rented her ground-floor apartment close to post.

It’s not roomy; her second bedroom has only enough space for a bed, and the kitchen’s not that big, either. But she has a washer and dryer, a spacious master bedroom and an assigned, covered parking space.

Best of all is the freedom and privacy that come with having one’s own space — something that most soldiers living in the barracks would much rather have, she said.

Fantroy said her monthly BAH of $1,242 easily covers her rent, but leaves her only $142 for utilities, which she said average about $330 a month, especially during winter months. So she’s going out of pocket to the tune of almost $200 a month.

The BAH is better than the $980 she got when she rented an apartment in Anchorage between March and October 2006, but it’s “barely enough to find the kind of place you want to move into,” she said.

Under a proposal from a Pentagon study group to increase BAH rates for single troops, Fantroy would receive an extra $332 per month.

“I’d be very happy with that,” she said. “They think that because we’re single, we don’t have the same expenses as married people.”