housing ON base. I've been to three of them very recently. You don't get TO the housing without going through a gate and showing an ID to either a military or civilian employee/contractor of the Department of Defense.
And military barracks are ALWAYS on base.
You're confusing off-base military "contracted" housing (a relatively new--in the last 25 years or so--idea that actually originated overseas, at facilities where land was limited and it was tough to find room to build more housing) where a local builder constructs housing and leases it, lock/stock/barrel, to the military for a set period of time, and the military fills it with personnel, with on base "military family housing" which is the paradigm and another thing altogether. This idea was imported to manage force/installation fluctuations in CONUS in select areas. It did not supplant on-base housing, it supplemented it. USN was a leader in this practice both overseas and stateside as a cost - saving measure. An obvious example of military "leased" housing is the facility at Gricignano between Naples and Gaeta Italy which supports both Navy installations at those sites as well as Army, USAF and USMC personnel assigned to NATO command and other entitities in the region.
When the military tires of that "off base" housing, they simply let the lease run out, and the builder/owner repossesses the building and fills it with civilians. This was a cost control measure that was being used to help manage fluctuations (as a consequence of the Cheney drawdown that was enacted in the early to middling years of the Clinton administration) during the BRAC years, when housing was regionalized and shared amongst installations (e.g. a person working at the Pentagon might be billeted in on base housing at FT BELVOIR). This happened most frequently when there was a large concentration of facilities in a given area, or portions of a facility were closed, but not the entire installation.
Security measures that are provided to on-base housing are less onerous than those provided to areas where classified material and senior personnel work--but that's been the case since they've been designing installations with security layers which are more difficult to breach the more operationally significant they are. Once onbase, you should still have a harder time getting on the flight line than going to the Quick Stop or the swimming pool near the housing area. Even if the security is not blatantly evident, it's there--but that is another topic altogether.
So, in sum, your experience is not controlling. There's still plenty of military housing on base, and the base commander does have authority over it. The trick for a good base commander is to maintain good order and discipline without being a jerk about it.
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