In 2006, the U.S. Army hired HRA to conduct oral history interviews, perform research, and write a book detailing the history of the Army’s momentous Residential Communities Initiative (RCI) Program. The Army tasked HRA with collecting and telling the story of the pioneering privatization program to improve quality of life for soldiers and their families. RCI partnerships eventually provided over 27,000 new homes and nearly 23,000 renovated homes on 44 Army installations.

To capture that history, HRA historians conducted 75 oral history interviews with RCI program directors, members of Congress, commanding generals, and company CEOs. The interviews became source material for writing Privatizing Military Family Housing: A History of the U.S. Army’s Residential Communities Initiative, 1995–2010. The book documents the Army’s partnership with the private sector to upgrade the dilapidated inventory of family housing, and recounts the program’s challenges and successes. In 2014, the National Council on Public History awarded HRA’s historians the NCPH Excellence in Consulting Award for their work on the RCI history.