Forest City Military Housing

By the mid-1990s, military housing in America was failing the people it was built for. The Pentagon counted 180,000 of its 300,000 family homes substandard, against a $20 billion repair backlog it estimated would take thirty years to clear. Congress’s answer was the Military Housing Privatization Initiative—one of the largest public-private undertakings in American housing—inviting private developers to compete, installation by installation, for the right to rebuild and run entire military communities. Forest City set out to win its share.

IFM was Forest City’s pursuit partner from the first RFP to the last. Over six years we built the presentations and films that carried its case before selection boards across five branches of the military—and we were on site for every presentation, from Fort Lee to Hawaii, refining slides and cueing videos down to the hour the doors opened. Branch by branch, those wins compounded into an $11 billion program: 15,000 homes across eight states.

Winning the work was half the job; running it was the other. IFM designed, developed, and hosted the program’s family of community websites—from Fort Lee and Fort Meade to Navy Region Hawaii—where relocating families could walk the neighborhoods, compare floor plans, check availability, and reach property management before their orders were even cut. The sites listened as well as they spoke: resident surveys and feedback forms gave the program a continuous read on satisfaction, closing the loop between families and management year after year.

Around that platform ran the rest of the communication program—videos, including an animated national map of the growing portfolio; town-hall and finance presentations; grand-opening programs and event collateral; marketing campaigns and photography of communities as they came to life. Across six years and more than fifty engagements, the work helped one of the country’s largest housing privatizations keep faith with its hardest audience—military families.