When Raven Roman moved to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with her husband, Jorge, an officer who has served in the U.S. Army for more than 18 years, she expected the house they rented from The Michaels Organization to be safe and updated. Instead, when she moved her three young children into the house at 5200 Stable Court, which Michaels manages as a private military housing contractor on the 8,700-acre Army base, carpenter ants had moved in first, entering the home from multiple points. Slugs started to appear under the kitchen sink, and the carpet she was told was freshly installed sported thumbtacks, rusty nails and ramen noodles, she said. In the months after Roman moved into the house in May 2018, she and her daughters, ages 12, 4 and 1 at the time, began experiencing a variety of health issues related to mold contamination, including rashes, coughs and fatigue, she said. The problem got so bad that months later, when Jorge Roman was called off-base, Raven checked her family into a hotel nearby and requested to be moved out of the home. “I felt homeless. My family was homeless at that point,” Roman told Bisnow. “How could any military family get to a point where they are in that position?” After bouncing around houses near Fort Belvoir, pleading with Michaels for repairs and remediation and asking officials on the base for help, Roman filed a lawsuit on March 16 of this year, alleging the owner and manager of thousands of housing units on the base allowed safety hazards and other substandard conditions to persist for years. Read the full story here. | |  |
