The theory is that they made it too upscale, which makes sense to me. Norfolk doesn’t have an awful lot of people in the tax bracket required to shop at Nordstrom. Online shopping killed the whole thing pretty fast, though - I worked there during college in the early 2010s and it was still consistently busy, but the couple of times I’ve been there while visiting my parents the last few years, it’s been dead as hell. I hear Lynnhaven Mall is still reasonably busy, but VB is definitely another world.