Developer aims to improve military lodging at bases across nation
Raquel Enero
Monday, July 30, 2012, 11:56:26 AM
Holes in the walls, mold on the ceiling and tables and bureaus stacked on top of each other to make them fit - this does not seem like the living conditions of heroes, yet that is what developer John Picerne saw when he took his first tour of military housing 11 years ago at Fort Meade. Now, the housing developer and chief executive of Corvias Group in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, is working with the Department of Defense to improve
military lodging and housing, The Boston Globe reports.
"It was a sad learning experience as I realized how poorly we were treating our military families," Picerne told the publication. He has since come to manage 3,000 housing units at Fort Meade, and has modernized 24,000 other military homes at
Fort Bragg, Fort Polk and other bases across the nation.
The off-shoot of his his real estate company, Picerne Military Housing, was around the same time as 9/11, which Picerne said had a serious impact on him.
"In that first year that we won the bid for Fort Meade, 9/11 happened, and my worldview changed dramatically," he told the news outlet. "We were now providing service and taking care of military members who were preparing for war. What seemed like a good business decision suddenly become less about career and more of a vocation for me."
Now, he says his work managing military homes is similar to his residential work, but with special considerations. For instance, in the homes of
Fort Bragg's 82nd Airborne Division, the company made sure paratroopers had enough closet space to hang gear like parachutes, he told the news source.
According to the Picerne Military Housing website, the organization aims to put families first, developing family-friendly neighborhoods at bases. Picerne is not the first to get involved with privatization of military housing. The DoD enacted the Military Housing Privatization Initiative (MHPI) in 1996 to allow private land and real estate developers to own, operate and maintain military lodging in order to improve living conditions for them.
When the program started, more than 50 percent of DoD-owned housing around the world needed serious renovation and modernization because they had not been sufficiently maintained over the last 30 years, according to the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Installations and Environment website.
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