Military Housing - Military Times

Sharing can lead to saving

JACKSONVILLE, N.C. — Marine Staff Sgt. Michael Martineu gave up searching the Internet for a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the Jacksonville area while he was still deployed to Iraq last year.

“I would have gone for an apartment, but there were no apartments to be had,” said Martineu, an infantry unit leader with Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

“In a perfect world, if Jacksonville was designed to hold the [48,000] Marines it has now, there would be plenty of housing for single Marines to live in. It’s supply and demand. The supply is limited, the demand is high.”

Martineu, 27, gets $811 a month in Basic Allowance for Housing. Because the average going rate is $800 a month for what he considers “nice” apartments in the area offering no more than two bedrooms, the single staff sergeant figured he’d be forced to find someone willing to split the rent.

So he opted for a three-bedroom house in downtown Jacksonville that he shares with a sergeant.

“If I didn’t have a roommate, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it,” he said.

Martineu’s half of the monthly rent and utilities — including electricity, cable TV and water — runs about $650 a month, so he’s not going out of pocket.

And his arrangement is better than the alternative, he said. “I’m 27 years old, I’ve been in the Marine Corps for nine years and I am not living in the barracks like an 18-year-old.”

Before he headed to Iraq in January 2007, Martineu said the BAH he rated as a sergeant just barely covered his rent on a one-bedroom “little hole in the wall” apartment.

He’s not complaining about the housing allowance he receives, but would be fine with getting the additional $222 that single E-6s would receive in the Jacksonville area if the gap between with- and without-dependents BAH rates were narrowed under a proposal from a Pentagon study group.

“I’m living off it now, so it’s good,” Martineu said. “But ... if I got a $200-a-month pay raise, I wouldn’t need a roommate. My roommate probably wouldn’t need a roommate. Even if I did choose to have a roommate, that’s money I could set aside to buy a house later down the road.”