In 2005, we moved into Military housing as active duty members with the USN. 2006, I retired from the Navy but continued to live in Military housing under a month to month lease agreement. In Oct. 2008 we were told that we had to move out because "we were retired" and said they don't allow retires to live there, they also claim they didn't know we were retired," but for the last two years we have hand delivered the rent check every month and we signed a lease contract when we retired, but they didn't know? Hmmm. So needless to say we had to move out within 2 weeks, pack up 5 children, and spend 4,500 to move out. but get this, two months later they put out a notice that they are now allowing retires to live there? Isn't that interesting!

Our problem doesn't get any better. when we had our move out inspection and signed the "end of terms contract" there was a Zero balance and they gave us a letter of recommendation saying we paid our rent on time every month. Two months after we moved out we get a letter from a collection agency saying we owed $1045. For pas due rent, we were blow away! We immediately called the Forest City management in Oak Harbor Wa, and they said they would send us "ledger" (a print out of months paid Vs. months owed), a couple days later we received this ledger and it showed May of 08 that we didn't pay, HOWEVER, we have receipts for every and all our months that we paid, we showed her this receipt and a week later we received a new ledger showing a different month we didn't pay so we proved that we paid that month too and this went on for about 4 months.

So, we then stopped dealing with the Oak Harbor office and request to speak to the MAIN manager of Forest city. We were given the number to Jackie, the Main manager of Forest City and have been trying to resolve this for a year. Jackie reviewed the records and she still cannot tell me what month we didn't pay. We have been back and forth, I have sent her all the MAC payments from the Navy showing what they paid and although we don't feel we should've had to send her all of our receipts and bank records showing what we paid, we did. This is now on our credit, people call here daily to collect this money even though we don't owe anything. They have the burden to prove we didn't pay a certain month; we shouldn't have to go out of our way to send all of our documents to prove otherwise. We take a lot of effort to watch out credit numbers and we pay every bill we have on time, this has affected our life dramatically and is very stressful when we are trying to buy a home but cant because of their error. While living in this housing complex they have changed names numerous times and went from being Military owned to privatized and I think somewhere down the lines someone wasn't honest, or just doesn't know how to run the office. They can't pin point the month we didn't pay, because we have proof that we paid every month on time. Their story doesn't make sense, if we owed them money why would they give us a letter of recommendation saying we paid on time? Why would they sign our "end of contract" when we moved out and it showed we owed them nothing?

These things confuse me and when I asked Mrs. Jackie the same questions she couldn't even tell me the answers. We asked for a copy of our sign out records ("end of contract" papers) and they conveniently can't find them. seems fishy to me. So, a year later this still isn't resolved, our credit is affected, and they still can't tell me what month we owe for. We talked to them again today and told them we were going to get an attorney and they said, "please give us till the end of this week, we are trying to work with you." How are they trying to work with us? And why is it taking them so long to figure out what month we didn't pay? If we owed them money they would be able to say what month we owe, it wouldn't take them a year and 4 different ledgers, (in which all were wrong) to figure this out.

I don't understand, we have sent them all of our records, which we didn't have to; just to prove that we did pay. my understanding is that when you own a business it's their duty of obligation to prove when you owe something. Forest City cannot do that. because we paid our rent on time every month!