As part of their capital campaign, WUNC reports that Corvias is renovating and building more than 200 homes at Fort Bragg:

John Picerne, the founder and CEO Rhode of Island-based Corvias, says he and a group of lenders are financing $325 million in major renovations and utility upgrades to about 16,000 homes on seven Army bases.

And, he said, the program will pay for itself: Corvias will be able to pay off the lenders from the savings that will result.

“So we have an estimated $300 million in savings over the next 30 years in energy efficiencies and a portion of that, and I think it’ll be more than $300 million,” Picerne said in an interview. “Obviously,

more predictive maintenance is far less expensive than emergency maintenance.”

…The new program, he said, is a start on those major upgrades.

Heather Fuller works for Corvias at its Fort Bragg office, and on a recent day she accompanied a reporter on a tour of one of the homes the company manages.

The vacant brick ranch-style duplex in a neighborhood of similar homes was clearly an older home, but didn’t show significant wear and tear.

It looked like is ready for someone to move in.

But the inside is about to be gutted and completely renovated with the new funding.

“It’s just dated, so the tiles in the bathrooms, they’re small,” she said. “They’re like, built in 1960s. So we’re renovating and making those larger. And we’ve taken some of these floor plans and added a bedroom, so that it would have four bedrooms rather than the three.”

A total of 280 homes on Bragg are getting the same treatment, while several thousand more will get new heating and cooling systems and other improvements.

…The new program is unrelated to hundreds of other teardowns, new home construction and renovations that the company already had planned as part of the normal cycle of its long-term agreement with the Pentagon.

A Corvias spokeswoman said the exact numbers at each base aren’t pinned down yet for the next round of that regular work, but that at Bragg, 160 homes will be torn down and 95 new ones built.