Drive West Broad Street through Glen Allen this fall and you will hit orange cones on both sides of the road within the same quarter mile. On the north side, heavy equipment has been working a section of the Westpark Shopping Center parking lot since spring. On the south side, Costco is tearing down two buildings next to its store. Neither project is random, and neither is really about construction. They are two different companies making two different bets on the same stretch of road, and if you live in western Henrico and shop at either one, the difference tells you something about where retail money is actually flowing right now.
Start with what is going up at Westpark. InvenTrust Properties, the Illinois-based real estate investment trust that owns the Publix-anchored center at 9645 W. Broad St., is building a new 8,400-square-foot retail outparcel on the section of the lot closest to Broad Street. County filings show the strip could be divided into as many as six spaces, with renderings suggesting room for multiple restaurants, some with patio seating. The building is expected to deliver by the end of 2026.
The bigger news landed in late August: Nordstrom Rack signed a lease for a 30,000-square-foot space at 9819 W. Broad St., inside the existing center, with an opening targeted for fall 2027. The space was most recently home to Painted Tree Boutiques, a vendor marketplace concept that is exiting the location. Gemma Lionello, president of Nordstrom Rack, said in a prepared statement that the company is "excited to grow our footprint in the Richmond market and introduce new customers to the Nordstrom experience."
Here is the part that makes this more than a routine lease signing. Nordstrom has not had a retail presence anywhere in the Richmond region since its full-line department store at Short Pump Town Center closed in 2020. The company sold that building in 2021, and the space has sat empty since, with a Dick's House of Sport now filed to take it over. Nordstrom is not returning to the mall corridor where it left. It is coming back a few miles east, to a grocery-anchored strip center with a Publix, a Planet Fitness, and a Crumbl Cookies, not a shopping mall with a food court and a movie theater.
That distinction matters more than the brand name does.
Two Projects, Two Different Bets
| Westpark outparcel | Costco fuel center | |
|---|---|---|
| What's changing | New 8,400 sq. ft. building, up to six storefronts | Fuel station expanding from 14 pumps to 24 |
| Signed tenant | Nordstrom Rack, 30,000 sq. ft., opening fall 2027 | None, it's Costco's own operation |
| Timeline | Delivery targeted Q4 2026 | Not yet announced |
| What it cost | Part of a 172,000 sq. ft. center built in 1990 | Sits on 5 acres Costco bought in 2023 for $13 million |
Look at what each company is actually buying. InvenTrust is adding retail square footage and diversifying who occupies it, moving from a vendor marketplace concept to a national off-price fashion retailer. Costco is not adding a single new department or product line. It is doubling the number of pumps at its existing fuel center, from 14 to 24, on land it purchased specifically for that purpose three years ago.
One company is betting that shoppers in this corridor want more places to browse. The other is betting that its existing members want to get in and out of the gas line faster. Both bets assume the same thing: that traffic through this stretch of West Broad Street is only going one direction, and it isn't down.
Why This Isn't Just A Westpark Story
InvenTrust's interest in this corridor goes beyond one shopping center. The company paid $86 million last year for West Broad Marketplace in Short Pump and $62 million in 2024 for the Stonehenge Village center, both Wegmans-anchored properties along the same general corridor. Add the Westpark expansion and you get a pattern: the same investor is putting money into grocery-anchored, everyday-needs retail up and down West Broad Street, not into the mall itself.
That is worth sitting with if you have lived through the last several years of Short Pump Town Center headlines, the Nordstrom closure, the years-long vacancy, the retail tenant churn. The story residents have absorbed is that the mall corridor cooled off. What is actually happening is narrower than that. The destination-mall model took a hit. The grocery-anchored strip center model, the kind built around a weekly Publix run rather than a Saturday shopping trip, is the one attracting fresh investment right now, and Nordstrom's own return under its off-price banner is following that same logic rather than fighting it.
What Stays The Same While The Cones Are Up
If you shop at Westpark regularly, the practical question is simpler than any of this: what closes, what stays, and for how long. Based on what's been filed and reported so far:
- Publix, the center's anchor and one of the first Publix locations to open when the chain entered the Richmond market in 2016 by acquiring the area's Martin's stores, is not part of either construction project and will keep operating through both.
- Chicken Salad Chick and Plato's Closet remain in their current spaces.
- Painted Tree Boutiques is the tenant vacating the space Nordstrom Rack will eventually occupy, but that transition won't show up as an opening for about a year given the fall 2027 target.
- The new six-unit outparcel building is separate construction from the existing storefronts and sits closer to Broad Street itself, meaning current shoppers will see site work in the front section of the lot before any new tenant signage goes up.
- Costco's fuel center demolition is happening on the south side of Broad, on land the company already owned, and no completion date has been made public yet.
None of that means the construction disappears quickly. Outparcel deliveries and gas station rebuilds both tend to run past their first projected dates, and neither company has published a hard finish line for the messier parts of the work. The realistic expectation for anyone driving this stretch regularly is a construction-adjacent fall and winter, with the Westpark side wrapping first and the fuel center following on its own schedule.
The Read For Residents
The headline version of this story is easy: Nordstrom Rack is coming to western Henrico. The more useful version is what it tells you about how this part of the county is being valued by the people who actually put capital into it. A national retailer that left the area's flagship mall in 2020 is choosing to come back through a grocery-anchored strip center instead, and the same investment firm behind that strip center has spent close to $150 million buying up similar centers along the same corridor over the past two years. Costco, meanwhile, isn't diversifying at all. It's doubling down on the one thing it already does well at this location and betting that more members will want faster access to it.
If you live along this stretch of West Broad Street, the next twelve months mean more orange cones before they mean more parking spots. But the direction of the investment is clear enough that it's worth understanding rather than just tolerating.
Search RVA Homes tracks changes like these across every corner of the Richmond metro, not because a shopping center redevelopment sells houses, but because understanding how a neighborhood is actually changing, store by store and lease by lease, is part of knowing it well. If you're curious what a specific western Henrico address is worth in today's market, or want a fuller picture of what's shifting in your part of the county, Search RVA Homes is a good place to start that conversation.
