A former extended-stay hotel on Riverdale Bend Road in southeast Memphis has been converted into 110 permanent homes for veterans who have experienced homelessness, with a grand opening ceremony scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday. The Memphis Veterans Village, run by the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, is designed to give residents long-term stability and independence rather than temporary shelter.
The property at 7060 Riverdale Bend Road previously operated as the WoodSpring Suites Memphis Southeast, a budget extended-stay hotel with more than 100 rooms, before it was acquired for adaptive reuse. Tunnel to Towers broke ground on the conversion on July 25, 2024, according to the Daily Memphian, with Executive Vice President Matt Mahoney framing the mission bluntly at the time: the goal, he said, was to ensure “homeless and veteran are not in the same sentence again.” The City of Memphis had cleared the way for the project the prior spring, approving a major planned development modification for the parcel on March 14, 2024, according to Memphis Zoning Watch, granting the municipal authorization needed to shift the site from short-term lodging to permanent residential use.
Friday's ceremony is expected to draw Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, First Lady Maria Lee and Shelby County Commissioner Amber Mills, according to WREG. Newly renovated rooms and common areas will be opened for tours as part of the event, the station reports.
Wraparound Services Beyond a Roof
The Memphis Veterans Village is meant to provide more than an apartment. Per WREG's reporting, the site includes addiction recovery services, mental health and PTSD counseling, VA benefits navigation, financial counseling, legal advocacy, and job training and employment assistance. Education assistance is also part of the offering, alongside the Mae and George Siller Scholarship Program, which provides scholarships for undergraduate degrees and accredited trade programs.
Tunnel to Towers says it has provided housing assistance and supportive services to more than 20,000 veterans nationwide, per the foundation's own figures cited by the station. The organization was created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and launched its dedicated homeless veteran program in 2022. Beyond housing, the foundation says it builds specially adapted smart homes for catastrophically injured veterans and first responders, provides mortgage-free homes to Gold Star families and to families of fallen first responders with young children, and says it has supported 10,000 children nationwide.
Part of a Growing National Network
Memphis joins a list of Tunnel to Towers Veterans Villages already operating in Houston, Atlanta, Georgia, and North Charleston, South Carolina, with affiliate veteran housing programs supported in Austin, West Los Angeles and Riverside, California. The foundation has seven more Veterans Villages under construction, with additional sites set to open in Detroit, Denver and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania this year and further openings expected in 2027.
The Houston property set the template for the model in November 2023, when Tunnel to Towers opened a 161-room facility pairing studio apartments with on-site case management, mental health counseling and job assistance, according to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation. Acquiring existing hotel buildings rather than building from the ground up lets nonprofits shorten development timelines considerably, delivering permanent housing months or years faster than new construction, as Hoodline previously reported on a similar hotel-to-housing conversion in Charlotte. Tunnel to Towers has used the same playbook for an 88-unit Atlanta Veterans Village and has eyed a former Ramada hotel in Jacksonville for 145 additional apartments.
Local Need and a National Decline
The opening arrives against a backdrop of steady but incomplete progress on veteran homelessness. Locally, the Community Alliance for the Homeless counted 249 veterans in sheltered emergency, transitional or permanent supportive housing across Memphis and Shelby County during its Point-in-Time snapshot on January 27. Nationally, federal Point-in-Time survey data released in June recorded 32,495 veterans experiencing homelessness as of January 2025, a 1.2% drop from the prior year and a 56.1% reduction since 2010, per the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Federal funding is also expanding to support the trend. In July, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs announced a $33 million expansion of the HUD-VASH program, which pairs rental assistance with clinical services, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans. Corporate support has helped fuel individual projects like Memphis's: the Home Depot Foundation has invested more than $24 million into Tunnel to Towers projects since 2011 to help furnish and construct Veterans Villages, part of a broader pledge to commit $750 million to veteran causes by 2030.
Tennessee has pursued more than one approach to the same problem. In Knox County, officials broke ground in February on Operation Hero's Hill, a tiny-home supportive village built in collaboration with high school career-technical students, a project Hoodline covered at the time. Memphis's approach — converting an existing hotel into 110 permanent units with services built in — reflects a different but increasingly common strategy nationwide for getting veterans off the street and into stable housing quickly.
