Editor’s Note: This story was reported in partnership with POGO Investigates, the reporting division of the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight. The organization’s separate Policy and Government Affairs division has lobbied Congress to address the “federal enclave doctrine,” described in this story, and submitted an amicus brief in December to the Supreme Court related to Vinales v. AETC II Privatized Housing LLC, a case challenging the same doctrine.
Sarah Kline knew that door was going to hurt someone. Heavy and thick, the swinging door between the kitchen and living room was barely hanging on its hinges. A jagged piece of metal jutted out at the bottom. So she reached out to the landlord, Hunt Military Communities, a private company that runs military housing where her family lived on Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, and asked to have it repaired. Then she reached out again. And again. “I’m having people over tonight. You can’t leave it like this,” she remembers telling a maintenance worker in October 2017. Still no one fixed it.
Neighbors and their kids arrived for the Halloween celebration, which doubled as a seventh birthday party for Sarah’s triplets, two girls and a boy. Her son dressed as the Joker; her daughters were both dressed as the Joker’s sidekick Harley Quinn; their parents called them the “Harley Twins.”
The swinging door banged as costumed guests fluttered between the kitchen and the living room, snacking on goodies. Sarah, dressed as Wonder Woman, mingled with friends. Her husband, then-Army First Lieutenant Jon Kline, had placed a spooky platter of sausages spilling out from the stomach of a medical-training mannequin onto the dining table. (At the time, he was studying to become a physician assistant at the nearby Army medical center.) Then the festivities were interrupted with a real injury—the door fell on a guest’s foot. Jon administered first aid to what he later called a “pretty significant laceration” in an interview. Looking back, it would have been much worse if a kid had been hit, he said. “That door probably weighed close to 80 pounds.”
The Klines say this sort of incident was typical of their time at Randolph Air Force Base—nicknamed the “Showplace of the Air Force” because of its 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival architecture.
The Klines’ neighbors in Randolph’s homes were close-knit, often gathering for parties or card games. But nearly everyone had a perennial home-repair issue, Jon said—typically a serial problem that Hunt Military Communities either failed to address or tackled with a temporary “band-aid fix.” During the Klines’ time there, they battled cockroach infestations, nonfunctioning smoke detectors, a “lagging HVAC system” that left them baking on 90- and 100-degree summer days, lead-based paint chips falling on their beds, a leaking roof, a cracked foundation, and mold, according to a lawsuit that the Klines later joined against the company. The Klines and 20 other military families describe similar patterns of housing neglect in four lawsuits filed in Texas federal courts against Hunt Military Communities from 2019 to 2022.
Sarah Kline became an advocate for improvements in military housing—after being forced to flee two contaminated homes. (Christopher Lee for the Texas Observer)
Hunt Military Communities, part of a corporate behemoth based in El Paso, wields a monopolistichold on military housing at more than 59 U.S. installations through lucrative long-term leases and legal agreements. The company is the largest of the 14 firms running military family housing nationwide and has more than 60,600 homes in 24 states, according to its website. In Texas, its portfolio includes family housing at Randolph, Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, and Laughlin Air Force Base in Del Rio.
The Klines and others argue in lawsuits that Hunt Military Communities is systematically under-maintaining those homes and intentionally misleading the families who live in them.
The military has failed to provide adequate oversight of Hunt Military Communities, including at Randolph and Fort Sam Houston, the Department of Defense (DOD) internal watchdog said in a 2025 audit. And the Pentagon’s bonus system has enabled the company to rake in more money despite allegations of inadequately maintaining the homes, according to lawsuits and interviews with experts, current and former government officials, and former Hunt employees for a joint investigation by the Project On Government Oversight and the Texas Observer.
Despite ongoing reports of chronic problems, this powerful real estate empire has largely evaded accountability through a potent brew of political influence and legal finesse—as well as congressional failures to enact reforms that would provide military families the same legal protections other tenants and homeowners typically enjoy. That’s according to accounts from military families, lawmakers, former employees, experts, advocates, lawsuits, surveys, audits, and official documents reviewed for this report.
“We recognize that providing safe, high-quality homes for military families is a responsibility that requires constant improvement,” said Carolyn Baker, spokesperson for Hunt Companies—and its subsidiary Hunt Military Communities—in an emailed statement. In response to questions for this investigation, she said its military housing subsidiary has increased transparency, modernized maintenance systems, heightened environmental and mold-remediation protocols, and improved processes for resident engagement in recent years.
In the mid-1990s, proponents sold privatization of military housing as a way to eliminate the DOD’s $20 billion backlog in housing maintenance. “We knew that we would never be able to budget enough money to be able fix all of that housing in any short time frame,” Joseph K. Sikes, then-director of the Pentagon’s housing and competitive sourcing, said in 2004. He predicted that 95 percent of “inadequate” military housing would be fixed by 2007. But privatization hasn’t eliminated the maintenance backlog, which has more than quadrupled since 2017 and remains estimated at nearly $7 billion, according to DOD annual financial reports from fiscal years 2017 to 2025.
Today, nearly all U.S. military family housing is owned and operated by private companies. While technically public-private partnerships, these housing companies typically own the homes on the bases while the military leases them the land, often through 50-year agreements.
In the Texas lawsuits against Hunt Military Communities, all of the families reported issues with mold and health problems that they linked to substandard housing conditions.Fifteen families reported losing or having to replace belongings, and 16 families dealt with rodent or insect infestations. “When Hunt received maintenance requests … Hunt would misdiagnose the issue, utilize substandard service providers to allegedly remediate the problems, and mislead its tenants,” one lawsuit alleges. “Hunt’s representatives frequently would simply paint over existing mold and exclaim ‘Problem Solved!’”
The company declined comment on pending litigation. In her general statement, Baker noted increases in resident-satisfaction scores and declines in response times for maintenance calls, plus “substantial reinvestments” as examples of improvements to Hunt-managed housing in recent years. She declined to quantifythe current maintenance backlog in its military housing portfolio but said the company is in “constant collaboration” with the Pentagon about “sustainment.”
The families’ legal claims and stories of hardships are supported by years of official government audits and reports that document the military’s own oversight failures, housing health and safety hazards, and barriers for families who seek recourse. In 2020, the U.S. government sued Hunt Military Communities and its parent company over failures to perform housing maintenance at an Air Force base in Delaware—allegations similar to those made in the Texas lawsuits. (Hunt paid $500,000 in 2022 to settle the suit with no admission of guilt.)
During the 17 months they lived at Randolph, the Kline family submitted 78 maintenance requests, about one a week. When the housing company responded, the problem was often addressed after delays and inadequately, the Klines’ lawsuit says.
Over time, Sarah Kline recalled in interviews that she and her kids began to feel persistently sick. Kline suffered wide-ranging and sometimes mysterious symptoms that she now attributes to mold exposure. One child started having regular nosebleeds. Kline and her two daughters suffered rashes, and all three kids had allergy symptoms and runny noses. She once had to call 911 about one daughter’s severe breathing issues. Disturbingly, Kline, who is allergic to mold, began getting weekly, debilitating migraines (previously, she had them infrequently), urinary tract infections, and emotional issues. Numerous medical studies have linked mold exposure to a range of adverse health effects, including respiratory problems and asthma, as well as neurological, immunologic, cognitive, ophthalmologic, and dermatologic conditions.
Ultimately, the Klines moved off Randolph in December 2018 and joined one of the lawsuits filed in Texas federal courts against Hunt Military Communities the following year. Those military family lawsuits allege that the company violated a slew of Texas statutes meant to protect tenants from fraud, deceit, and housing neglect by landlords.
But in response, Hunt Military Communities’ lawyers offered a stunning rebuttal: They argued that their company doesn’t have to follow many of those laws. “[Randolph Air Force Base] is … governed by federal law rather than state law,” its lawyers argued in a July 2022 court filing.
When the Klines arrived at their new home at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, in January 2019, they hoped to escape their Texas housing nightmare. They had felt forced to use privatized military housing again because of West Point’s secluded nature and the high cost of off-base housing in New York. But when they unpacked, they found dark splotches of mold blanketing bedding and photos that had been transported from Texas. Then they discovered more in their new home.
“It was bad,” Sarah Kline recalled. “The beams were covered in mold.”
West Point military family housing is managed by a different private company, Balfour Beatty Communities, which was later found guilty of major fraud over falsification of maintenance records, stemming from a 2021 Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation. Within a couple of years, the Klines had discarded nearly everything they owned because of contamination.
Kline felt exasperated and sick. Her migraines continued, and she developed rashes all over her body. Still, she wasn’t ready to give up. In October 2019, she cofounded the Armed Forces Housing Advocates, an organization that assisted military families with housing woes. The network existed for several years, then disbanded following mounting legal pressure from subpoenas served by housing companies.
Kline is a tenacious person—“Calling me abrasive is a compliment,” reads her bio on X—and a fierce advocate. At the 2019 West Point graduation ceremony, she surreptitiously snuck a note to General Mark Milley, then-chief of staff of the Army, and enlisted his help. But Kline would soon learn just how powerful her opponents were.
Hunt Military Communities is the golden child of Hunt Companies, an international real estate conglomerate founded in 1947 in El Paso that has been owned and operated by four generations of Hunt family men. The scion, Woody Hunt, grandson of founder M.L. Hunt, served as Hunt Companies’ CEO from 1977 to 2015 and continues as senior chairman of the board. His brother, cousin, two sons, and nephew all hold senior leadership roles.
Hunt Companies, which now manages family housing at 25 Air Force bases, inked its first military housing contract to construct 300 units at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico almost 60 years ago, according to its website. “We’ve been in military housing since 1969 and have probably built more units than anyone else since World War II, with a market share at times bordering on 60 percent,” Woody Hunt told Multifamily Executive, a trade publication, in 2011. (He declined an interview for this article.) In the late 1970s, Hunt Companies expanded into housing development and property management, beginning with communities in El Paso and Fort Worth. When Congress passed a law allowing private companies to finance construction for military family housing in 1984, Hunt Companies received the first contract.
But it’s much more than a military base landlord. In an interview, Samuel Stein, a housing expert and the author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, called Hunt Companies a “pretty powerful quasi-monopoly” in the real estate sector. As of 2022, the firm had 2.4 million square feet of commercial properties worldwide. A 2021 SEC filing for a Cayman Islands subsidiary indicated the parent company’s net assets were valued at “roughly $2.0 billion.”
Woody Hunt is a big name in El Paso—and beyond. He’s been named “El Pasoan of the Year” three times; he’s served on local, state, and university boards, and he helped found an economic development and advocacy organization to bring jobs to the border. Hunt contributes to federal candidates in both parties. He holds strong sway in Texas politics, donating heavily to major state politicians and Republican PACs, retaining a stable of lobbyists for Hunt Companies, and winning prominent gubernatorial appointments.
He and his wife, Gayle, have donated over $9 million to federal candidates and political action committees since the 1990s—around the time Hunt Military Communities was formed. His contributions are “bipartisan, transparent, legally compliant, and reflect long-standing support for education, civic leadership, and public service,” a Hunt Companies statement says. Since 2020, the company has spent $2.1 million on federal lobbyists, whose work has consistently included privatized military housing issues, congressional filings show.
At a March 7, 2019, hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut delivered a blistering critique of military housing companies like Hunt, lamenting that privatization essentially traps families in base housing, since the government automatically pays rent whether complaints are resolved or not. “They are landlords. They may be slumlords, but they’ve counted on this cash cow. It is a risk-free cash cow,” Blumenthal declared.
Among those grilled by committee members in that hearing was then-U.S. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, who at the time oversaw the department’s budget of more than $156 billion. Wilson was asked whether military housing should meet the same standards as those in neighboring civilian communities. She ducked the question, declaring that the private companies lacked support from military command to do “quality assurance.”
A former Republican New Mexico congresswoman, Wilson had long been supported by Woody Hunt. Federal records show that her congressional campaigns received $18,500 in contributions from the Hunts between 2002 and 2012.
The day after the hearing, Wilson announced her resignation as Air Force secretary. She’d already gotten a new job, with a $500,000 salary plus perks, as president of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Her pay drew headlines, since it was more than her predecessor had earned after 30 years of service. Hunt, a major university donor, served on the search committee.
The company said in a statement that Woody Hunt had met Wilson only once in person and that his political contributions to her campaigns reflect “shared commitments to public service.” Wilson did not respond to a request for comment.
Sarah Kline learned she was pregnant with triplets while her husband, Jon, a Green Beret, was deployed in Iraq. She had a challenging, high-risk pregnancy: The babies arrived at 7 months—weighing around 3 pounds each—and spent a month in the NICU. Sarah, then 21, visited daily, researching and advocating for their care. After they turned 3, she returned to school to earn a master’s degree, learning to help other parents and providers dealing with high-risk pregnancies and stressful premature births.
Years later, when she ran up against housing issues at Randolph that seemed to threaten her family’s health and safety, Sarah again began to analyze and advocate. She remembers wanting to know: “Who owns the company that is doing this to me?” She researched Hunt Companies’ expansive assets—including El Paso’s minor league baseball team—and recalled in an interview how often she’d been told the military subsidiary lacked money for housing repairs.
She concluded there probably was enough money. “It just wasn’t being spent on us, regardless of the suffering that we were enduring,” she said.
In 2020, she arrived at the U.S. Capitol with other housing advocates to lobby lawmakers and push for legislative solutions. They met in March 2020 with U.S. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican who had already cosponsored legislation intended to improve accountability for military housing companies. Afterward, Sarah and her fellow advocates dined with Fitzpatrick at a Capitol Hill pub called Hawk N Dove. To her, Fitzpatrick seemed personable and kind. “He didn’t have military housing in his district. He was just someone that was willing to help,” she recalled in an interview.
Shortly thereafter, Fitzpatrick’s campaign received a $2,800 donation from Woody Hunt. “They’re following me!” Sarah remembers telling another advocate. She was only half-joking. “It just seemed like every time [we visited congressional offices], they just kind of knew we were going to be there,” a fellow advocate on the trip recalled. Hunt had contributed $1,000 once to Fitzpatrick in 2017 but began donating higher amounts and with greater frequency following Kline’s meeting, totaling $18,000 between 2020 and 2023.
Fitzpatrick’s bill died in the House Armed Services Committee, but in the 2020 and 2021 defense spending bills, Congress approved several reforms intended to remedy issues in privatized military housing. Unfortunately, implementation and sufficient oversight of these reforms has faltered, according to government reports in the years since.
Sarah Kline looks through records related to the legal battles with Hunt Military Communities. (Christopher Lee for the Texas Observer)
Even when military housing privatization began in the 1990s, some senior DOD officials were skeptical that the program would achieve its goals of cost savings and improved quality. Bernard Rostker was one of them. Rostker served in various high-ranking Pentagon leadership roles from the 1970s through the early 2000s. He worried that bad actors would try to “scam the system,” he said in an interview. “Sticking a profit-making entity in the middle of this, with a guaranteed income flow and lax enforcement … is absolutely ridiculous, but that’s what we did,” he said.
Indeed, a 2024 report by the Congressional Research Service found that military housing privatization has been “ultimately more expensive” for taxpayers. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD’s budget request included $5.4 billion for privatized housing. “The goal of these efforts was to cut costs for the government while increasing the quality of housing for our servicemembers and their families,” wrote Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in a September 2025 letter to DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth. “Unfortunately, this approach has failed.”
Watchdogs have repeatedly identified problems with the privatized military housing sector in general—and with Hunt Military Communities specifically. The DOJ’s 2020 lawsuit against the subsidiary and Hunt Companies drew on allegations made in a whistleblower lawsuit by employee Christine Kibler, who claimed that other employees had lied about completing repairs in military family housing to win bonuses and get more government funds. The fraud scheme allegedly lasted from at least January 2013 to June 2019, according to the government’s lawsuit, which was later settled. “Since then [Hunt Military Communities] has strengthened compliance, verification, and oversight. Allegations inconsistent with our policies are investigated and addressed under our zero-tolerance policy,” a Hunt Companies statement says.
Hundreds of Hunt Military Communities employees, many of whom lived in Texas, raised more alarms in a 2021 class-action lawsuit that alleged that the company illegally withheld pay for years from maintenance staff for on-call hours. Hunt settled in August 2023 by agreeing to pay roughly $1.06 million, records show. (Two former employees interviewed for this story, who are not being named because they fear retaliation from Hunt, say that the company’s behind-the-scenes response was to stop requiring workers to be on call for maintenance emergencies. Both said this could create problems in emergency cases and violates contract requirements and industry standards.) The company confirmed that on-call hours for maintenance staff are now voluntary but said the on-call policy is “fully compliant” with overtime rules and laws and emergency coverage is maintained.
Through her activism and lobbying, Kline met more military moms who were fighting the housing companies. And she joined forces with prominent Houston plaintiff’s attorney James Moriarty, whose firm represents the Klines and other families suing Hunt. Moriarty became a mentor, “like a dad,” Kline said. In 2023, he hired her as his managing director of advocacy.
Moriarty grew up in what he calls a “typical military family.” He’s a decorated former Marine who served three tours in Vietnam. Moriarty’s daughter served in the Navy, and his son, an Army sergeant, was killed on a CIA mission in Jordan. Moriarty completed his active duty in 1969, the same year Hunt entered the military housing business. He earned his law degree at the University of Houston in 1981 and accumulated decades of experience going up against corporate giants like Tenet Healthcare and Prudential Securities, before taking on Hunt Companies.
Moriarty calls the Hunt business model a “self-licking ice cream cone.” In an interview, he criticized its cycle of deferring military housing maintenance as a strategy to earn more lucrative construction and real estate deals. The military’s poorly administered bonus system for meeting quotas rewards this pattern, he contends. “One, you get more money in the short run. Two, you can lie about hitting the government’s expectations so you get the bonuses. And three, someone’s going to get hired to replace that shit when it all falls down,” he said.
Hunt Companies contends that its mission is “maintaining financially sustainable communities, reinvesting in the homes families live in today, and preserving these assets for future generations of service members.”
Kline and other families’ lawsuits in Texas collectively involve Hunt-owned housing at the Randolph, Laughlin, and Goodfellow Air Force bases and the Army’s Fort Sam Houston (for which Hunt Military Communities took over property management in 2021 from Liberty Housing). All the lawsuits make allegations of real estate or common-law fraud and other forms of illegal or deceitful acts by Hunt Military Communities, including breach of contract, deceptive trade practices, breach of implied warranty of habitability, breach of implied warranty of good and workmanlike repairs, and various violations of the Texas Property Code and other state laws.
But a federal appeals court would have to decide whether Hunt Companies actually had to follow those laws.
When Mary Beth Pisano and her family moved into their home on Randolph Air Force Base in November 2018, a neighbor warned that prior tenants had left because of flooding issues in the crawl space. The Pisanos were assured the house was fine. “We took care of any issues there may have been before,” a resident service specialist at Hunt Military Communities wrote via email.
They didn’t know they had just moved into a place that would later bear the unfortunate nickname “The Poop House.”
The Pisanos quickly noticed the newly repainted rooms weren’t drying because the house was so humid, according to a lawsuit they later filed. They started running a dehumidifier around the clock and began submitting requests for a variety of needed repairs, but workers never seemed to address the problems. Within months, Mary Beth, her husband Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Carmen Pisano, and three of their children began experiencing ailments they would later blame on mold exposure in a lawsuit. Their 10-year-old developed severe intestinal problems. Another daughter suffered asthma attacks.
In the fall of 2019, the Pisanos complained about a leaking air vent, and a Hunt Military Communities contractor examined the crawl space. Once the trapdoor was opened, “A vile odor engulfed the home,” court records show. The repairman found “8 inches of raw sewage had accumulated” under the house, according to an email the Joint Base San Antonio commander sent on November 7, 2019, to Hunt Companies leadership.
Mary Beth Pisano said they evacuated that same day—the family ultimately lost nearly all their possessions to mold damage. In the aftermath, she was contacted by two families Hunt had tried to relocate into that house. One shared a home maintenance history provided by Hunt. It was “a joke,” Pisano said in an interview. There was no entry for the day the sewage-filled crawl space was discovered, but 10 days after the Pisanos evacuated, an entry lists “smell in the butler’s pantry.” There were different options for categorizing home maintenance orders: routine, urgent, and emergency. The entry was designated “routine.”
The Pisanos never met the Klines at Randolph, but they did after joining the lawsuit with them and eight other families.
(CREDIT: POGO)
In response, Hunt Military Communities’ lawyers argued in 2022 that many present-day housing, consumer, environmental, and property laws don’t apply to people like the Klines and the Pisanos who live at Randolph Air Force base. Instead, they’d be subject to the laws that were in place when the land was acquired for the base in the 1950s.
The company’s 312-page filing in the Western District of Texas in San Antonio claimed that base housing is exempt from all state and local laws passed after the year homesites were ceded to the federal government because of a constitutional provision known as the “federal enclave doctrine.”
Hunt Military Communities’ lawyers argued, among other things, that the housing at Randolph doesn’t come with a promise of habitability because Texas didn’t have such a legal requirement until 1978. The company similarly claimed there was no implied warranty of “good and workmanlike repairs” for military families’ houses because that state law didn’t pass until 1987. On the same grounds, its lawyers argued in a 2023 filing that military spouses and other family members technically have “no rights” as tenants because they aren’t signatories on the lease. Hunt’s lawyers cited an outdated law from 1903 that dealt with legal obligations between a master and servant as an example of a law that would apply.
Judges in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately ruled in Hunt’s favor, finding in June 2025 that military families at Randolph don’t have state and local legal protections enacted after the federal government acquired that land seven decades prior. “It absolutely blew my mind,” Jon Kline said of the moment he learned about the federal enclave doctrine. “I can’t really conceptualize how the legal system could look at it and say that absolutely makes sense.”
The ruling underscores the complicated nature of jurisdiction on military bases that makes it hard for families to disentangle what their legal rights actually are. Even the DOD doesn’t appear to know which rules or laws apply in some cases, according to a 2023 report. The agency found that even within a single base, different sets of laws could be applied depending on the year individual parcels of land were ceded to the government. For example, El Paso’s Fort Bliss has four jurisdictional statuses for different sections of the same base.
Following the 5th Circuit Court ruling, the Klines and Pisanos’ lawyers turned their sights to the Supreme Court to see if it would take up the case.
In June 2025, the same month as the 5th Circuit ruling, Brian Stann, CEO and president of Hunt Military Communities, held a town hall for residents about housing issues at Fleenor Auditorium on Randolph.
A former Marine Corps captain, Stann took a circuitous route to the military housing industry. He served two tours in Iraq and later found fame in professional mixed martial arts and cage fighting. Next, he became a color commentator for Ultimate Fighting Championship and Fox Sports. Stann admitted in a podcast interview that he had “no clue about real estate” when he landed the COO job at a housing company subsidiary of Cerberus (which was cofounded by the current DOD deputy secretary) after conducting mixed martial arts training for its executives. Following nearly four years at the Cerberus firm, he was hired at Hunt Military Communities.
Mary Beth Pisano attended the town hall; she wanted to confront Stann in person. During the Q&A period, she asked whether residents should trust the maintenance histories of the homes they’re getting. “Yes, it goes back seven years,” Stann replied. She then explained how her former home’s maintenance history hadn’t been adequately disclosed to subsequent tenants. “I think that’s a statement and not a question,” Stann said, noting that she had pending litigation with the company.
Another woman, who described herself as a resident of base retiree housing, asked why her maintenance work orders were closed without being addressed. Stann offered a team to review her case but remarked, “I can’t dive into that rabbit hole.” Then, a man who identified himself as a former employee told the crowd he’d been instructed to close out unfinished maintenance orders: “I just want everybody to understand, it is still going on.”
In response, Stann said anyone caught doing that is “terminated on the spot.” He declined an interview for this story.
Falsifying work orders, the allegation at the center of the government’s fraud case against Hunt Companies, persists in military housing nationwide, according to data from the nonprofit Change the Air Foundation. In November 2025, the foundation surveyed 3,401 people in Texas and 29 other states who had lived in privatized military housing. Nearly 90 percent said they had to report the same housing issue multiple times to get help, and 66 percent said persistent housing issues were falsely marked by maintenance staff as “resolved.” Other housing companies—including Balfour Beatty Communities and the Michaels Organization—have also faced lawsuits and congressional scrutiny over safety hazards in homes and maintenance practices.
Additional problems were uncovered at seven family housing projects in Texas and three other states managed by Hunt Military Communities in a 2025 audit by the DOD’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Auditors found inadequate maintenance guidance and resources, inconsistencies in responses to safety hazards, “inappropriate” bonus fee structures, overpayment of incentive fees, and “ineffective” oversight by the military. In an interview, DOD OIG program manager Christopher DePerro said the audit’s purpose was to assess government oversight and declined comment on Hunt Military Communities’ performance at the audited bases.
In a response to the audit, Hunt Companies general counsel Sharyn Procaccio wrote: “Our industry is subject to a level of oversight and scrutiny that is unparalleled in the conventional real estate sector.”
Sarah and Jon Kline with their triplets, Konnor, Kennedy, and Kyleigh, in San Antonio
Mary Beth Pisano and her family left Texas in August 2025, nearly six years after they were evacuated from their home on Randolph. “It feels really good to put a lot of distance between us and Randolph Air Force Base,” she said in an interview from their new off-base home in North Carolina. Pisano tries to help other families but said she’s careful to strike a balance these days—both she and her husband were diagnosed with PTSD after their housing ordeal. “I’m not like a Sarah Kline,” she said. “I hear she’s super involved and networked and that’s amazing.”
Kline underwent brain surgery in April 2023 connected to her chronic migraines. The problem recently returned, and she may have to repeat the procedure, but her medical issues haven’t slowed her down. She traveled to D.C. three times in 2025, holding more than 50 meetings with congressional offices and 10 with Pentagon officials that year. Advocates’ efforts failed in December to close the federal enclave loophole via the 2026 defense spending bill. The bill did include a section on eliminating mold in military housing but lacks a meaningful enforcement mechanism, she said.
Both the Pisanos and the Klines had hoped for relief from the high court. But in January, the Supreme Court denied a petition to revisit the 5th Circuit Court’s ruling, allowing the lower court’s decision to stand in regard to military housing. That means the Kline and Pisano lawsuits can move forward in federal district courts but without using any legal remedies approved after 1952, when the base land was ceded to the federal government.
In the meantime, Kline continues to push for Congress to fix federal law and help military families like hers. She’s already laying the groundwork for incorporating accountability measures into the 2027 spending bill, urging lawmakers to slow the stream of funding to housing companies and find alternate solutions that empower families. “They have proven that they’re not able to successfully remediate or manage these project budgets, or give us clear data,” Kline said.
Kline said she sees her advocacy as a duty. “We’re a legacy military family,” she said. “I don’t want this problem to impact [my kids] and my future grandchildren the same way it affected me.” But the stress of their housing ordeal has taken a toll on her marriage. These days, Jon and Sarah are separated, though they remain friendly and co-parent their triplets. They live just a mile apart in San Antonio. Neither lives on a military base.
Julienne McClure contributed research and data analysis.
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