Philip Rizzo, Lincoln’s vice president of operations, told Reuters the Texas-based company worked hard to combat the vermin, and billed the family because the carpet had other stains. Even so, he said, Lincoln offered in June to drop the charge – if the couple signed a non-disclosure agreement. “Mrs. Limon was still going on Facebook” to complain, he said. “And we said, ‘That has to stop.’ ” The couple refused to sign.

Disheartened, Corporal Limon, who had served in the Middle East, left the Marines when his tour of duty ended this August. The Limons still owe Lincoln.

“He was supposed to retire out of the Marine Corps,” his wife wrote to Reuters on his last day. “None of this was ever part of the plan.”

The Limons had been defeated by two forces that can trap military families in substandard homes across the United States: powerful private landlords and inadequate tenant rights.

Under California law and in other states, tenants in unsafe or decrepit housing can get out of their leases. They can make repairs and deduct the cost from rent. They can call local government agencies to enforce health codes. But on federal military bases, different rules apply.

Tenant rights are set by the military and private landlords under contracts that give companies control of housing for 50 years but lack basic protections civilians take for granted. As a result, military families have little recourse in resolving health threats such as rodents and mold, a Reuters investigation found. Reporters analyzed thousands of pages of contract documents, tested for mold in homes, inspected photographic evidence and spoke with more than 100 families living on U.S. Navy, Marine, Army or Air Forces bases. What emerges is a detailed portrait of their struggles with these landlords in disputes over household hazards.

“We have an entire segment of society that is putting its life on the line for the rest of us, and effectively they are walled off from accessing these laws and the remedies under them,” said Emily Benfer, a professor at Columbia University Law School who works with tenants and nonprofits to get landlords to improve housing conditions.

These tenants find themselves contending with Goliaths. Lincoln, a contractor at Camp Pendleton, is among the biggest of the military landlords, managing one of every five units in the privatization program. In all, the company and its affiliates manage 36,000 military family homes.

Reuters calculates that the public-private housing projects in which Lincoln participates reap nearly $875 million in revenue a year from military housing tenants, roughly a fifth of the $4 billion a year the Defense Department pays in rent stipends for privatized on-base housing. Lincoln sometimes partners with other companies that do new construction and renovations, but Lincoln manages the base housing operations.

Lincoln Military President Jarl Bliss said the problems documented by Reuters at its homes are exceptions. “We can't run 36,000 homes and do all the services that we provide across these branches of government and have a 100 percent success rate,” he said.

He cited high ratings from tenants in surveys and high occupancy rates in Lincoln’s homes – above 90 percent – as signs of satisfaction.

“The families have a choice,” he said. “They don't have to live with us.”

U.S. Senator Mark Warner, D-Virginia, whose state is home to thousands of enlisted families, called the cases documented by Reuters “simply unacceptable.”

“It’s deeply troubling to hear firsthand accounts of military families that continue to be exposed to dangerous living conditions,” Warner said. “This is not how the nation should treat our troops for their selfless sacrifice.”

CONFLICTING INTERESTS

The housing contracts, families say, give the landlords the edge in disputes. Many states and municipalities, for instance, allow tenants to withhold rent when landlords fail to meet basic health, structural and safety standards. That was not a ready option for another Camp Pendleton Marine family struggling with Lincoln over mold blooms and illness earlier this year. If service members live on base, the housing allowances they receive as part of their pay typically go directly from the government to their landlord.

In many localities, tenants suffering serious housing problems also can move without penalty. In military housing, families can’t count on that safeguard. That was true for a family with persistent leaks and mold in their home on the Naval base in Gulfport, Mississippi. They would have had to pay a Pennsylvania-based landlord more than $1,000 to break their lease, so they stayed. After Reuters inquiries, housing operator Balfour Beatty Communities moved the family into a hotel as it hauled out mold-covered drywall.

U.S. localities typically have authority to order landlords to address violations of local housing and health codes. These protections rarely extend to tenants on military bases. When an Army family encountered mice, cockroaches, leaks and mold in housing run by a New Jersey-based company at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, they could not turn to local health code enforcers. The civilian inspectors don’t have authority to go on base.

Enlisted families can complain to base officials. But if they do, they’re turning to a military hierarchy that’s in partnership with the private companies operating base housing. The system creates an inherent collision of interests pitting service members against the military-industry partnership. With little oversight, landlords have tremendous power.

“Military families have two choices – put up and shut up or pay the astronomical cost of moving off base,” said Crystal Cornwall, a Marine spouse at Quantico in Virginia. She is leading a grassroots effort to mobilize military spouses to press Congress for better protections. More than 1,300 have joined a Facebook group she helps administer.

In New Orleans, Bonnie Plettner and her Marine captain husband fought Louisiana-based Patrician Management for more than a year, seeking repairs to broken outlets, peeling paint and a water leak in privatized Navy housing. When the couple investigated a foul odor coming from the air vents, they found what appeared to be black mold, Plettner said. Patrician denied it was mold and declined to do additional testing, emails show.

Plettner asked local and state officials to conduct a safety inspection; they told her they had no jurisdiction on base, she said. Naval medical staff said they could not order testing, because she lived in privatized housing. Her husband’s superiors warned that Patrician could terminate their lease if she continued to complain. “I have been told … over and over again, ‘Not my problem, not my jurisdiction,’” Plettner said.

After their one-year-old child developed respiratory problems, they paid $1,500 themselves to clean the ducts in the summer of 2017. Patrician refused to reimburse them and, without explanation, declined to renew their lease. The couple scrambled to move off base.

Mark Wesley, Patrician’s area manager, said “all issues were addressed and completed” in the home and that “Patrician was within its authority to issue a non-renewal notice.”

Plettner contacted the Navy’s hotline in Washington D.C. The Inspector General replied in a letter that, under the Navy’s contractual relationship with the housing managers, the Navy “has limited authority” to intervene in business affairs.

It’s a conundrum of the military's own making.

HANDING THE KEYS TO CONTRACTORS

Two decades ago, the Defense Department warned that widespread disrepair in base housing “runs the risk of collapsing the force because the most dedicated service members will decide to leave.”

Congress passed legislation authorizing the military branches to transfer ownership of base housing – now valued at $8 billion – into new public-private ventures that would replace substandard homes with new or renovated units and manage them for the next five decades.

The program can point to noteworthy upgrades: 80,000 new homes have been built and 50,000 units renovated on bases nationwide over the past two decades, the department said.

Still, the military’s contracts with industry leave enlisted families largely to fend for themselves against some of the country’s largest landlords. Many have no other option: Moving costs for deposits and advance rent easily reach thousands of dollars. That can be a stretch on a military salary. Marine corporals, for instance, earn base pay of $2,089 to $2,536 a month.

The DOD says military base families have the same protections as civilian tenants, and the contracts require landlords to provide safe housing. But base officials have limited enforcement power. That power is delegated higher up the chain of command and rarely used.

Families in base homes “receive the same level of protection as in civilian housing,” said Scott Forrest, assistant commander of asset management at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, which runs the privatized housing program for the Navy and the Marines. Under the business agreements, however, the landlord is solely responsible for addressing problems in day-to-day operations, he said. There, the command has “a limited role.”