Story and photo by

Ryan Wilson
Communications Coordinator, Navy Housing Forest City Residential Management, Inc.

After a month long campaign, Forest City has made a successful transition to email-based communication with its housing residents. Already, Forest City has sent out several emails regarding issues that had an impact on residents, including radon detector removal from homes, speed bump improvements and on-base recycling. From now on, residents can expect to receive emergency notifications, notices, newsletters and event schedules from Forest City via email.

More than 100 Navy Family Housing residents received prizes for taking part in Forest City's "Hi email. Bye tree-mail!" campaign which ran through January.

The Subee family and the Whitehead family won the grand prizes of the iPod Touch and the Sony Reader, respectively. Resident services managers distributed the grand prizes to the happy residents. Another 100 residents won gift cards and thumb drives.

"These gifts are our way of thanking residents because they helped us to say, 'Hi email. Bye tree-mail,'" said Pat McGlamery, resident services manager.

There is still a portion of the resident population that has not yet updated their email addresses with Forest City. They are being asked to contact their resident services office as soon as possible.

"It's critically important that we have the most current email address for all of our residents," said Kari Diaz, general manager. "Our emails will contain information about events that directly affect our residents, their homes and their neighborhoods."

Forest City reports that the majority of residents have responded positively to the email program.

"I can't express how great it is to be switching from 'tree-mail' to email," said Jessica Lehue, a Radford Terrace resident.

Forest City hopes the enthusiasm that residents like Lehue have for this program will spread to all the residents who have not yet updated their email addresses. They also think the resident support they are already getting for "Hi email. Bye tree-mail!" will contribute to the ongoing success of the program.