Housing Shortages Near Bases Leave PCS Families in Hotels for Months

Military families receiving Permanent Change of Station orders frequently arrive at their new duty station to find no available housing -- neither on-base nor in the surrounding community. Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state is approximately 1,000 units short of meeting demand. Fort Carson in Colorado was operating at full capacity by 2022, forcing newly arrived families to search for hotels and short-term rentals. High-demand bases in Hawaii, California, and the National Capital Region maintain waitlists where Priority 1 families wait six months or more during peak PCS season. The immediate consequence is that families spend weeks or months in temporary lodging -- hotels, extended-stay motels, or Airbnbs -- while waiting for either a housing unit to open or a lease to become available in the local market. Temporary Lodging Expense (TLE) reimbursement covers only 10-14 days in most cases, after which families pay out of pocket. A family of four in a hotel near JBLM at $150/night burns through $4,500/month while simultaneously paying for household goods storage. Children miss the start of school. Spouses cannot begin job searches. The stress of living out of suitcases while a service member begins a demanding new assignment undermines family stability and unit readiness. The housing shortage near bases has structural causes on both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, military installations are often located in areas with limited housing stock -- rural bases, islands, or communities that did not plan for military-driven population growth. Local zoning restrictions, NIMBYism, and insufficient infrastructure (roads, schools, water systems) constrain new construction near bases. On the demand side, PCS moves are concentrated in the summer months, creating an annual demand spike that the housing market cannot absorb. A single base might receive thousands of incoming families within a 90-day window. The privatized housing model was supposed to solve this by attracting private capital to build and maintain adequate on-base housing stock. But housing companies have underbuilt relative to demand because their revenue is capped by BAH rates, and construction costs have risen sharply. Building new units on-base requires navigating both military bureaucracy and private-sector financial constraints, resulting in projects that take years to approve and years more to construct. Legislation introduced in September 2024 proposed incentives for developers to build near bases, but market-rate incentives do little when the target population's spending power is fixed by a government allowance table. PCS moves increased 12% in spring 2026, intensifying an already inadequate housing pipeline. The system assumes that housing will be available when families arrive, but the system does not ensure it.