Tunnel to Towers pays off mortgages for 30 military families on Veterans Day
The Tunnel to Towers Foundation paid off the mortgages of 30 Gold Star families across 22 states on Veterans Day, a step toward its goal of 343 mortgage-free homes in 2026.
The Tunnel to Towers Foundation paid off the mortgages of 30 military families on Veterans Day, providing mortgage-free homes to surviving spouses and children of service members who died in the line of duty. The recipients are Gold Star families spread across 22 states, and they come from nearly every branch of the U.S. military. Foundation chairman Frank Siller announced the payoffs on Fox & Friends.
The program is designed to ease the financial burden on families who have lost a loved one in service. Eligibility extends beyond military personnel to first responders killed in the line of duty, and the foundation's Gold Star Family Home Program specifically targets surviving spouses who are raising young children. The recipients named in the announcement include families from Texas, Maryland, Washington and California, giving a sense of how widely the assistance is reaching across the country.
Siller pointed to a particularly painful thread running through the families the foundation serves. Many of the fallen service members died of cancers linked to burn pits, the open-air trash disposal sites used at overseas bases during the post-9/11 wars. Those deaths have drawn growing attention to the long-term health consequences of deployment, and for the families left behind, the loss often arrives years after the service itself has ended. Against that backdrop, the foundation frames the mortgage payoffs as a way to remove one of the heaviest financial burdens a surviving household can face.
The mortgage payoffs are part of a larger goal. The foundation aims to provide 343 mortgage-free homes in 2026, a number that honors the 343 firefighters killed on September 11, 2001. The effort coincides with the foundation's 25th anniversary year, marking a quarter century since the attacks that prompted its creation.
The foundation also marked Veterans Day by opening a new facility in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Veterans Village occupies the former Phoenix Mill on the Susquehanna River and includes 61 apartments along with 20 one-bedroom comfort homes. The development is designed to house more than 80 veterans who need permanent housing, and it offers job training, help with benefits, and mental health and addiction treatment. The Harrisburg site is one of several such villages the foundation operates, with existing locations in Memphis, North Charleston, Houston and Atlanta. A Denver village is set to open on December 9, and seven more developments are under construction and expected to open in 2027.
The foundation's Homeless Veteran Program, launched in 2022, is central to that work. Tunnel to Towers says it has served more than 20,000 veterans and 10,000 children to date. Taken together, the Veterans Day announcements show an organization that has broadened its mission from memorializing the 9/11 dead to supporting the families and veterans who have carried the costs of later conflicts.
Source: foxnews.com
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