The New Veteran Affairs Clinic / Hospital in Fredericksburg is coming along nicely. Officially called the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic – Fredericksburg Health Care Center (HCC), is located in Spotsylvania County, just two miles south of the Fredericksburg City limits.

This new facility, which will open in late 2024, will be the nation’s largest privately-owned outpatient clinic for the Department of Veterans Affairs. The new location will consist of four stories with 426,000+ square feet of space and is expected to serve more than 29,000 Veterans annually. It is located on a 48-acre plot of land (5313 Patriot Highway), that is bound by US 1, I-95, and Hood Drive.

Once complete, the facility will bring many expanded services to Veterans, including primary care, mental health care, specialty care, pharmacy, and diagnostic imaging. New specialty care services are expected to include pulmonary, gastroenterology, cardiology, dermatology, audiology, pain services, neurology, and physical therapy. And is expected expected to generate more than 300 jobs the first year it opens with that number increasing to approximately 550 in 2026.

It will include a “healing garden”, veterans memorial, and greenspace amenities that surround the building to create a distinct character to each quadrant. The builder for this project is Harvey-Cleary Builders, and the Architect and Interior design is by a company called Little Diversified Architectural Consulting.

This is huge for veterans up and down the East Coast, but there is an ugly hidden side to this project that no one is talking about.

This area of the Route 1 corridor is littered with motels that are mostly all monthly rentals. This means that though they are a hotel, they have a majority if not all of their rooms rented for entire months.

Monthly hotel rentals are usually a place where the homeless go when they are either one step away from living on the street or one leg up from once living on the streets. There are literally hundreds of rooms rented this way in the area, with motels like Royal Inn Motel, Stay 4 Less Motel, Garden Inn Fredericksburg – South, Knights Inn, Super Value Inn Fredericksburg, and Econo Lodge Fredericksburg. And many of those rooms are rented by veterans. So the new hospital will likely displace hundreds of homeless veterans.

With this new clinic, there will certainly be new lodging opportunities coming to the area in the form of new hotels so visitors to the clinic will have places to stay while they are being treated, plus a place for the transient hospital staff.

If you didn’t know, large chunks of hospital staff, mostly doctors and nurses, often travel from hospital to hospital for months at a time. And when they are bouncing around like this, they will need places to stay too.

The new hospital will likely replace services being offered by several other local VA facilities in the area, such as the McGuire Veterans Affairs Medical Center, the Fredericksburg 2 VA Clinic – Southpoint, and the Massaponax VA Clinic.