Infestations of rats, mice and other rodents. Toxic black mold. Lead paint.

The deplorable conditions of a lot of low-income housing -- in urban areas, on American Indian reservations and in unincorporated communities along the Mexican border, for example -- is well known.

But these conditions are also found in the housing provided to our military personnel. Basically, they are the equivalent of “4F” -- the military classification that means someone is unfit to serve.

“I noticed chipping paint on our outside entry doors and on all of our windows, and became concerned it was lead paint,” a resident of privatized military housing in South Carolina said in a report to a Senate subcommittee.

“When I mentioned it to maintenance, they shrugged it off,” the resident continued. “I was told I did not have lead paint by one person over the phone. After being denied several times for my concerns, I ordered my own lead check test kit. When I tested the door and window, it came back positive.”

The report from the Military Family Advisory Network is full of troubling testimony like this about how poorly some of our service people are housed. Here’s another instance:

“My house had strong electrical currents that would severely shock you, and when we complained, they said it was ‘dry air,’” a New York resident reported. “Then an outlet blew, frying my computer (that was plugged into a surge protector) and almost setting my house on fire.

“Had to do a sit-down strike at management to get them to bring an electrician in,” the resident continued. “Turns out, my house wasn’t properly grounded, which the outside electrician said was common for these military houses.”

The report makes for eye-opening reading. After surveying some 17,000 military residents in 46 states, MFAN discovered our soldiers, sailors and airmen and women shared their military housing with a wide array of unwelcome guests: roaches, ants, fleas, wasps, bees, spiders, bedbugs, mosquitoes, ticks, crickets, worms, termites, beetles, maggots, silverfish, earwigs, rats, mice, squirrels, shrews, moles, skunks, bats, snakes and birds.

One respondent reported having 400 bats in her attic.

These problems are occurring in “privatized” military housing, in which the Pentagon has contracted base housing ownership and management to private firms.

More than half our service members live off-base, but there’s still a lot of privatized military housing. How much? The Department of Defense reports there are 202,000 such units on its bases.

News reports and congressional investigations have sparked action all the way to the top. Last fall, Defense Secretary Mark Esper met with the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, as well as executives from some of the private companies that own and manage the properties -- outfits such as Lincoln Military Housing, Balfour Beatty, Hunt Military Communities and Corvias Military Living -- to determine how these issues are being addressed. The military services and the private managers have come up with a remediation plan that includes:

-- Establishing a resident bill of rights and common lease framework.

-- Increasing transparency and reporting service work orders.

-- Enhancing ongoing oversight and leader engagement.

-- Improving communication with residents at all levels.

But it’s not certain that’s going to be enough for some in Congress, who have denounced the shoddy housing provided for some of our military men and women and their families.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland introduced a bill to improve housing conditions for service personnel after Warren conducted an investigation and forwarded her findings to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Haaland -- whose district includes Kirtland Air Force Base, adjacent to Albuquerque -- pointed to an Army inspector general’s report that found “widespread failures by the private housing companies to provide adequate housing, and Department of Defense failures to adequately oversee its Military Housing Privatization Initiative.”

While acknowledging problems in the MHPI program, the Pentagon still supports privatized base housing. It says the initiative solved a $20 billion maintenance backlog by leveraging private finance to the tune of $32 billion to rehab old units, with a DOD outlay of just $4 billion.

Meanwhile, families at several bases have sued their property managers over what they allege are unsafe and unhealthy housing conditions.

In the latest development, the Government Accountability Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- has weighed in with a report to Congress. And Elizabeth A. Field, a director in GAO’s defense capabilities and management department, whacked the Pentagon and its military departments in testimony to a House subcommittee.

Speaking about the GAO’s preliminary recommendations to strengthen Pentagon oversight of privatized housing, Field said that while the administration conducts some oversight, some of those efforts “have been limited in scope.”

Among other things, the GAO found:

-- The performance metrics the military departments use to monitor private partners fail to provide meaningful information on the condition of housing.

-- The maintenance data collected is not reliable or consistent.

-- The reports DOD provides Congress on the status of privatized housing are unreliable.

The GAO’s draft report recommends the Pentagon “take steps to improve housing condition oversight, performance metrics, maintenance data and resident satisfaction reporting, as well as to assess the risk of initiatives on project finances.”

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this column.

We are all dreamers. We love to stargaze about what the future holds. Early in 2019, even this column got in on the act with a story about a "Future House."

But just how well do we predict what's going to happen five, 10 or 20 years down the road? We rarely look back to find out. But the folks at Angie's List recently commissioned NeoMam Studios to return to yesteryear to see how close prognostications from the 20th century came to what actually occurred.

As it turns out, some of the more fanciful ideas put forth back then were just that: fanciful.

Specifically, the British marketing firm looked at six rooms -- the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, game room, bathroom and dressing room -- as envisioned by home designers during the previous century.

"Some of the era's wildest ideas" were about these rooms, NeoMam's report says. "Sometimes wacky, sometimes idealistic and sometimes not too far off what we see in 2020 homes, these visions for the future from past generations are an untapped resource of inspiration for homeowners who want to take risks and create spaces that are unique."

The report is a follow-up to one on how previous generations imagined the houses of today would look. And similarly, the most outlandish of their ideas -- a ball-like rolling house, for example, offered by Everyday Science and Mechanics in 1943 -- failed to gain any traction.

In the latest return to the future, NeoMam discovered one prediction that everything in the houses of the 21st century would be waterproof so that the "housewife" -- men didn't do housework back then -- could just use a hose to clean her manse.

In the living room, then, the furniture, rugs, draperies and "unscratchable" floors would be made of either a synthetic waterproof fabric or plastic. A blast of hot air would dry the room's contents, while the excess water would run to a drain in the floor. Presumably, the floor would be slightly slanted toward the drain the way it is in a shower and tub. And when Mom was not doing heavy cleaning, the drain would be covered by a rug.

In the kitchen, meanwhile, refrigerators were predicted to have revolving shelves, which may not be too far off from what is available in today's models -- some of them make two types of ice cubes, for crying out loud.

Another prediction was the advent of marble countertops. But in this case, the countertop itself would be an induction-heated cooking surface. The oven, meanwhile, would be a glass-doomed unit that sat at the end of the counter.

In the master bedroom, a 1960s prediction that the television set would hang from the ceiling didn't come to pass, nor did the notion that the set's control would be inset in a bedside table. But those ideas weren’t far off. Today, we use handheld remotes to control our wall-hung TVs.

Game rooms? How about an indoor pool with partially submerged, swim-up gaming systems? Never happened.

In 1988, Robert Zemeckis, the writer/director of "Back to the Future," commissioned consultants Tim Flattery and Edward Eyth to dream up what the bathroom would be like in 2015. Some of their ideas made it in to the film, but most didn't.

One that failed to make the grade was the bio-cleanse cleaning chamber, an environmentally progressive unit that conserves water by using a steam spray and heat lamps for bathing and drying. Other failed-to-materialize items include an in-wall waste disposal outlet and a computerized medical diagnosis and treatment center.

Eight years before Marty McFly and Doc Brown flew their DeLorean time machine back and forth between timelines, famed French artists conceived of dressing rooms that contained, among other things, a machine that would cut and style a lady's hair. Not even close. Today, the closest we come to dressing rooms are oversize master baths and sitting rooms.

As far as the house itself is concerned, of the seven "sometimes astute, sometimes idealistic, often absurd" concepts NeoMam looked at in its earlier study for Angie's List, none made it in to production. But some offered ideas that weren't far off the mark.

Take the Dome House featured in the June 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. Its rotating dome would allow occupants to make use of solar energy by following the sun as it rose in the east and set in the west.

The authors of "Unfinished World" spoke of using super-light "aerogels" to create earthquake-resistant structures that would require fewer resources to build. Today, graphene aerogel, the world's lightest material, can be used in 3D printers to create all sorts of things, including buildings.

Other schemes were out of this world. For the New York World's Fair in 1964, General Motors proposed an underwater house. And from the 1920s, a glass house that would admit ultraviolet "health rays" from the sun was offered. But the glass used in the house became a commercial failure.

And then there was the aforementioned rolling house, circa 1934. The spherical innovation was intended to make remote construction and delivery of new houses easier. But it didn't. The space house offered by Science Fiction Adventures magazine in 1953 didn't fly, either.

For a look at the concepts mentioned here, as well as others in the two reports, check out: bit.ly/future-rooms and bit.ly/future-houses.

There are at least three things in life you cannot choose: your parents, your neighbors and the company that administers your mortgage.

That company collects your house payments, and also pays your homeowner’s insurance and property taxes. Known as “servicers,” these outfits work on behalf of your lender -- or the investor who purchased your loan from your lender -- to make sure you make your payments and that those other bills are paid.

Sometimes a lender services its loans itself. Sometimes it sells the servicing aspect of your mortgage, but keeps the loan on its books. Sometimes the lender sells the loan and the rights to service it. And sometimes one servicer will sell the right to administer your loan to another servicer.

Whichever way it goes, you have no choice. You’re stuck.

According to Mike Seminari of the Stratmor Group, an industry advisory firm, of the 52% of all borrowers who had contacted their servicers, only 6% said they were likely to recommend the company. That’s not exactly a strong vote of confidence.

Of course, it could be that these unhappy customers simply didn’t receive the help they were looking for. Or maybe their discontent is related to a billing mistake -- 6% of all loans held by lenders have billing errors, according to Seminari -- or another error, perceived or legitimate.

Whatever the reason, servicers have now figured out that it costs them a lot less money to reach out to their customers rather than wait for calls to come in.

“’Don’t poke a sleeping bear’ is no longer the philosophy,” said Dave Vida of SLS Enterprise Sales at a recent conference. Servicers now realize that “outreach is vital. We need to find out what’s going on” with borrowers before they feel the need to call in.

In that regard, you should expect to receive a clear, concise welcome letter from your servicer -- one “written by a human being,” said Jason Kwasny of The Money Source Inc., not a computer. Call it a “warm transfer.”

The letter should explain everything you need to know about how your loan will be administered, and include all pertinent phone numbers, should you ever experience a problem. And the letter “should be followed up by a welcome phone call” that walks the borrower through the process, added Kwasny.

“If you spend time up-front, you eliminate problems later,” said Kwasny. “Give them a white-glove experience.”

Meanwhile, in another conference session, experts in cybercrime described how the financial services business -- and the mortgage sector, in particular -- has become a favored target of hackers looking to tie up their systems and demand big money to unlock them.

The health care field is hackers’ No. 1 target, reported Gretchan Francis of Proctor Financial, but financial services is a close second. Even off-the-shelf software is being peddled online to novice hackers looking to make a quick buck, she said.

“The bad guys really are out there,” added Rich Hill of the Mortgage Bankers Association, which sponsored the conference. “They’re all over the place, trying to find new ways to get in.”

Over the last 12 months, Evan Bredahl, a cybersecurity engineer with the Richey May advisory firm, has worked on 20 ransomware cases in the mortgage space, many of them involving servicers. He can’t talk about the details because of nondisclosure agreements, but he did say that half the problems emanated from malware contained in emails.

Truth be told, though, the malware could have been delivered weeks, months or even years ago, with the hacker just biding their time, waiting to flip the switch, Francis said.

Lenders and servicers are taking whatever precautions they think necessary to protect themselves and their data. Cybercrime is both “preventable” and “defendable,” said the MBA’s Hill.

But sometimes, a hacker manages to get in no matter what. When that happens, their targets’ businesses can be stopped in their tracks.

On average, companies that report being hacked say their systems are down for 16 days, Hill reported. But the true duration could be longer, because not all attacks are reported -- largely because of the public relations nightmare that kind of news could generate.

If companies can restore their systems in a few days, or if only part of their business is taken down, they often ignore the ransom demands. But if the entire company is shut down, the ransom paid by servicers can be huge. In one case cited by Francis, a company paid $8.5 million to get back in business.

And why not? If you can’t operate, it’s often cheaper to pay the ransom and be done with it. “If you can’t access your accounts, you can’t service your loans,” said Bredahl, who is a “certified ethical hacker” -- a tech expert who looks for security vulnerabilities. “Being out of business just one week could be more damaging than paying a hacker millions.”

Ironically, though, once the ransom money is paid, most hackers make sure their marks manage to get back up and running without any hitches. Some even give their targets a 30-day guarantee that they will become operational and remain that way.

“Their customer service is so unreal, it’s shocking,” said Hill. “It’s their business; it’s how they make money,” he explained. “Otherwise, no one would pay the ransom.”