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Safe and clean streets and playgrounds.
Kids can attend on base elementary and middle schools in many locations.
Short commuting time/distance to work.
Typically get more square footage and garage or basement than you would on BAH living off base.
Friends and relative can't just pop in on you since they need an ID card to get through the gate...this can be seen as a pro or con.
Utilities are free on most bases, however many are starting to "meter" your usage and pay the member an allowance to pay their own.
If something goes wrong or breaks, you call housing maintenance and it gets fixed or replaced.
Disadvantages:
If you don't like HOA's, you may not like base housing. You will get tickets for not mowing your lawn or raking leaves, or leaving your trash cans out too long. Some bases enforce the rules more than others.
For me it's the typical downfalls of suburban living...lawn mowers going non-stop on weekends, barking dogs (seems like half the base residents own dogs), not a lot of privacy...everyone knows your business.
Sometimes living on base, you feel as though you never left work.
pro - good place to get to know the area for a year before you jump in and buy a house or get stuck in a lease to find out the neighborhood you picked is not as nice as you thought it was.
pro - related to the safe and clean streets and on base schools - I have school-aged kids and I feel like I could grant them more freedom to roam in on-base housing and, depending on the layout of the base, the pre-teen could even hop on his bike to go to the shopette or BX "mall". Your kids might be able to walk to and from school easily.
con - related to what he said about never leaving work, sometimes those who live on base will get called back in first ahead of those off-base if there is a problem (eg - it would take my husband 40 min to get to work vs. 10 min for someone else if there were a problem that needed to be addressed in the off-hours).
Yep, all of the above! Only one more comment: We preferred living off base overseas because we enjoyed being among the "locals" and learning more about our host country. Granted, some foreign assignments are better for off-base living than others...
Thanks for the replies everyone. We are currently living off base and wondering if going on base is a good idea (mainly for when hubby deploys). I can't drive and figure it would be good having everything withing distance. I'm just wondering if we will see a big difference in money cuz as far as I know, you get less money for BAH.
Deploying is one reason we lived on base for so many years. There are enough things to worry about when deployed. If you are in base housing something breaks call maintenance and they fix it in no time at all free of charge. Safety another big plus. Elementary school on base was another plus for us.
On-base housing is a baby factory. Spend a weekend sitting nearby and watch. Also, everyone gets pregnant together, so most of the children are the same age. It's a safe place to raise a family and have lots of babysitters close at hand. Personally, you couldn't pay me to live on-base, but some cities would be unsafe outside the perimeter. I guess it depends on what city you live in and what your family demographics are.
on base housing these days is in the middle of a huge transformation from miltary built and maintained units to commercial built and maintained units.
i lived in both, and let me tell you, the private contractor took better care of the houses, and built some seriously awesome units. the "new guys" (junior-mid enlisted and officer) get the newest stuff (as it should be) and let me tell you, some of the first contractor houses at Ft. Meade were flat out awesome. There were E4s living in houses that would be 500K+ out in Columbia MD. Anyway, note that not all houses are nice. Some of them still suck. But it beats the commute and the other issues associated with renting or owning. Plus, the days of buying a house and flipping it 3-4 years later are over (I know some more senior guys were doing that, and a few got soaked. I lost 2K on a house myself.)
We don't have any children and don't plan on having any in the next. few years, so that aspect isn't concern to us.
Thanks for all of the info everyone.
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