Travis AFB

carolinapooh, BSN, RN · May 14, 2010

Usually on-base housing is reserved for members with dependents only, especially if there's a waiting list. The only singles who live on base are the airmen, usually E-3s and below (E4s can usually request to live off base and receive BAH) and they live in dorms.

AF Nur · May 14, 2010

ok cool. Now I gotta look for a 'good' neigborhood to live in.

Hungry4Success · May 14, 2010

I actually live here in the local area. Try searching on AHRN.com and you should find some pretty nice houses in the area. Suisun (where i live) is a really nice small town and vacaville is bigger but still just as nice. Just try to stay away from Fairfield. That is where trouble is usually found.

AF Nur · May 15, 2010

Thank you very much. How long would it normally take you to get to work? And, is traffic a problem out there?

Hungry4Success · May 15, 2010

normally it takes about ten to fifteen minutes. its close enough infact to hear taps and reville play. as for traffic, i have never had a problem at all.

mt_nurse · May 16, 2010

No traffic problems.. We are an hour or so away from SF. To get to work you can take backroads. You will encounter traffic only if you decide to go to the Sacramento area or the San Francisco area on highway 80. Don't worry about traffic!

AF Nur · May 16, 2010

Cool. Cos around DC., traffic is a B!@#

BLESSED916 · May 21, 2010

I left travis around 2009 but when i was leaving a civilian contractor took over base housing. To my understanding, they were building more than 600 new housing units so the housing on base shouldn't be that bad. I lived on base but i was an e-4 at the time with a family and the housing was pretty decent for being enlisted and all. I could literally wake up 10 minutes before work and get their right on time =D.

carolinapooh, BSN, RN · May 22, 2010

Most of what I'm about to post will apply to only those with dependents, so if you're single, it won't matter since you can't live on base (although at one time and not too long ago, just to fill houses, they were giving single airmen with an E4 or higher houses on base).

One thing to consider with on-base housing (ok, so it's a couple of things now that I think about it): currently your BAH pays everything including utilities. As civilian contractors take over, this is going away. All the new houses here on Lackland (and I was told by the housing office this is becoming the rule) are being individually metered and will soon get utility bills separate from the monthly rent (because essentially you're renting when you live on base). On Lackland, this will start in late 2011 (they're building a whole bunch of new units here as well).

Space and how much of a house you're entitled to is determined by rank and the size of your family and occasionally the sex and ages of your children. In short, the DOD says it's OK for two boys to share a room and for two girls to share a room, but a boy and a girl won't (unless they're really little - I have heard of this before). Generally an older child will not have to share a room with a much younger sibling. They've gotten pretty sharp on this since I was a kid and it's a definite improvement.

You have to look at what you get for your rank in a given area, because in some cases it may not be worth surrendering your entire housing allowance if you can do better off base.

Here, an 01 with no dependents other than a spouse gets a nine hundred to eleven hundred square foot house with one bedroom, based on availability. My housing allowance is $1290 a month. I'm currently renting 2700 square feet with a decent sized yard three miles from Lackland in a brand new development (I get to WHMC in about five to ten minutes in the morning) for $1000 a month - and had we had a realtor who was a bit more savvy and a bit more switched on and had we done a bit more research beforehand, we could have done even better. The rest of my housing allowance covers the utilities, with the exception of cable. To me, it's not worth living on base because I'd pay more for less than half of what I have.

With that said, if I lived in, say, Washington DC and got stationed at Andrews or Bolling, I'd work my behind off to get on base because the trade offs would include no beltway traffic, and the rent/housing in the DC area is stupid expensive to start with. A smaller house would definitely be worth not fighting the Capital Area Beltway every day.

Not trying to butt in, but there is stuff you should also consider and may not have even given a thought to. Look at rent in the area on a site like realtor.com or the site someone else recommended, and then compare that to what you find out about on base housing.

babieblue2 · May 11, 2011

Looks like the waiting list for base housing is pretty long at Travis. Anyone know of a good website to find off base housing? Or a specific complex that is under $1200/mo and allows bigger dogs- a lab