The parking lot for the Favreau Hall enlisted barracks on Fort Shafter, Hawaii, is filled to capacity on Jan. 22, 2026. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)
FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii — Army Garrison Hawaii is doubling up soldiers in barracks rooms on Oahu to deal with the influx of personnel transferring to the 25th Infantry Division as part of an Army transformation.
With a growing number of complaints and queries by soldiers affected by the living-space crunch, leaders of the garrison and the division hosted a town hall meeting Tuesday afternoon at Schofield Barracks to detail steps being taken to ease the problem.
The doubling up has led to a dearth of barracks parking, overflowing dumpsters and insufficient laundry facilities, as well as concerns over privacy and security.
Army regulations dictate the minimum square footage single soldiers must have in barracks, but the garrison obtained a 15-month exception to that policy to temporarily house more soldiers together in barracks on Schofield, Wheeler Army Airfield and Fort Shafter, garrison commander Col. Rachel Sullivan said at the town hall.
“I would love to be able to tell you that 15 months from now we won’t have to have any soldiers doubled up in our barracks, but the reality of the situation is we likely will,” she said.
“We have a growing mission,” Sullivan said. “Right now, we are tracking more than 690 soldiers that are inbound over and above our outbounds in the next 120 days. We’ll still have many of those soldiers over and above our number of barracks rooms even 15 months from now.”
The 25th ID’s assigned strength has grown over the past six months in part because of the Army’s modernization effort, Transformation in Contact, division commander Maj. Gen. James Bartholomees told the town hall audience.
The initiative is designed to shorten the gap between weapons and tech innovation and their ultimate use on the battlefield.
“We are leading the Army in a lot of transformation, particularly in our artillery, our sustainment and our aviation, upcoming,” Bartholomees said.
Other enabling units have grown in tandem, he added.
“We’ve gone beyond our inventory of single-soldier housing,” Bartholomees said.
The division is also at “max capacity” in authorizing those soldiers to seek housing outside military installations, he said.
More than 1,000 soldiers have been given so-called statements of non-availability that authorize them to live on the local economy, Sullivan said. But off-base housing is complicated by both the high cost and shortage of housing on Oahu, she said.
A specialist’s $2,600 monthly basic housing allowance is not, on average, sufficient to cover the cost of rent and utilities on Oahu, Sullivan said.
“Affordable housing is one of the greatest concerns of the entire state of Hawaii,” she said. “We are under immense pressure from the local leaders here, the local community leaders across the state, [and] state, city and federal government here, to house as many of our soldiers and families on the installation as possible.”
The garrison is hoping to ease some of the near-term pain by providing beds and furniture that are “more conducive for those of you who are having to share rooms,” Sullivan said.
Some of the beds for newly arriving roommates now are little more than cots used for field exercises, she said.
The garrison is also pressing for early completion of ongoing renovations of two barracks, one on Schofield and a second on the adjoining Wheeler.
