Veteran Garie Spencer, who lives in Salt Lake City’s Freedom Landing on North Temple with 108 other formerly homeless veterans, will help celebrate the opening of Freedom Diner, a kitchen and dining room where the veterans will be able to gather for coffee in the morning, cook for one another and share meals.
Freedom Landing, owned and operated by the
Housing Authority of Salt Lake City, is in an old Days Inn, so the motel rooms-turned-apartments lack kitchens.
The new diner just off the lobby was once a breakfast room and, after the Housing Authority turned the motel into transitional housing for homeless veterans, a television room.
Now, it is decorated in Americana, with big blue and white floor tiles, the Coca-Cola tables and stools, and a huge bank of red cabinets stocked with canned goods, pasta, rice, cereal and even toilet paper, donated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Veterans will have music from a jukebox where they can play CDs, dock their music players or listen to the radio.
One of the two stoves is wheelchair accessible, as are some of the counters and tables.
Kelly Olsen, one of the five female veterans living at Freedom Landing feels it will be good for making friends.
The goal of transitional housing like Freedom Landing is to help the veterans gain stability so they can live independently and work.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has five case managers on site who work with the veterans, and the VA pays the housing authority a per diem amount for each veteran, which covers the agency’s costs. Between 40 percent and 50 percent of the veterans at Freedom Landing have jobs and pay 30 percent of their rent, Leka says.
The project began three years ago as part of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki’s goal of ending veteran homelessness by 2015.
"We may be the first of the states and Salt Lake may be the first community in ending homeless veterans," says Bill Nighswonger, executive director of the housing authority.
Salt Lake Tribune
