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the new Veterans Affairs medical clinic.

You might have driven past the shell of the old Safeway on Harris Street recently and wondered what all that construction was about. The Safeway closed when the big new Safeway opened farther up the road.

Pierson Company has gutted the old structure and is now upgrading it to meet federal seismic standards and remodeling 16,000 square feet of it to meet the Veteran's Affairs needs, says Greg Pierson, who's also managing the property for the owner, L&H Properties. Eventually a new facade will go up, and likely by the end of September or early October the folks working at the old vets clinic site, on F Street, will be able to move in, says Judi Cheary, spokesperson for Veteran's Affairs at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. The old clinic site will be closed -- but the new one will indeed be new and improved, with expanded services.

"The new services will include extended mental health services, radiology services for simple Xrays, eye care and audiology care, and telemedicine -- where a veteran can receive speciality care from San Francisco without having to go to San Francisco," said Cheary.

The new VA clinic will be owned and operated by Veteran's Affairs, unlike the old clinic which was run and operated by contractors -- who were "great," said Cheary. But, she said, the needs have grown and so Veterans' Affairs was ready to take over. The VA has a 20-year lease on the building from L&H.

There's another 13,000 square feet on the site, said Pierson, adding, "We're not disclosing what's going in there now."

The Department of Veterans Affairs has signed a 20-year lease with L & H Properties, LLC, to rent the West Harris Street store.