Norfolk Premium Outlets is an open-air shopping center at 1600 Premium Outlets Boulevard in Norfolk, Virginia, beside Lake Wright and the Virginia Beach line. More than 75 stores trade in seven buildings. At the end of 2025 the center was 99.2 percent leased.
Norfolk closed Lake Wright Golf Course in 2014, and the center opened on part of it on June 29, 2017. About 50 shops and restaurants were open that day. The leasing plan called for 85 to 90.
The harder part was getting cars to it. Simon proposed a road running into Virginia Beach, and Virginia Beach refused it in 2015, so the whole approach was built on the Norfolk side.
Premium Outlets Boulevard ends there. Vacant land next to the center, over in Virginia Beach, is approved for 180 apartments. None of it is built.
The city closes Lake Wright Golf Course
Norfolk ran a golf course on the eastern edge of the city, on about 114 acres beside Lake Wright and hard against the Virginia Beach line.
The city closed it on July 1, 2014. Norfolk said Lake Wright Golf Course had become too expensive to maintain.
Across the city's golf operation, General Fund support was $250,000 in fiscal 2012 and $495,000 in fiscal 2014, close to double in two years.
By November 2013, the land was already changing hands.
On November 12, the Economic Development Authority signed a purchase agreement with Simon Acquisition II LLC for about 51 acres.
NRHA had transferred roughly 114 acres of the golf-course property to the authority less than a month earlier; an independent appraisal put it at $19.4 million.
The course was still open when Simon's agreement was signed, with about eight months left before closure.
By the time the golf course closed, Simon had a contract to buy part of the land. The sale closed in 2016.
The development authority sold the land below market
Before that ground could hold stores, its designation had to change.
Norfolk's plan had it down for office and open space/recreation use, and the zoning was Open Space Preservation and Light Industrial.
On August 26, 2014, the City Council approved the change to commercial at 6282 Northampton Boulevard, along with rezoning to Retail Center and a sign overlay district written for the project, which let the center run its own sign system instead of sitting under the ordinary district rules.
Norfolk's own budget material had described a 450,000-square-foot outlet center on the site.
In 2016, Simon Acquisition II LLC bought 50.7 acres from the city's Economic Development Authority for $4.8 million, with 44.4 acres closing in May and another 6.3 in October.
The authority said the below-market price reflected Simon's obligation to pay infrastructure costs.
Those costs had reached $11.8 million by June 30, 2017, more than twice the land price.
So the roads were the developer's to build. In 2014, which city they would run through was still open.
Virginia Beach refuses the road
The route Simon wanted ran east.
Lake Wright Boulevard would have left Northampton Boulevard and headed toward Miller Store Road, crossing into Virginia Beach through the Burton Station area.
An extension of Wesleyan Drive sat alongside it as the alternative concept.
The stores would be in Norfolk, and Norfolk would get the local sales-tax revenue.
The Virginia Beach stretch of road and the traffic on it would be in Virginia Beach.
Virginia Beach planning staff found the route inconsistent with what the city had planned for Burton Station.
The Planning Commission went the other way and voted 9-1 that the road was in substantial accord with the adopted land-use plan, which pushed the question up to the City Council with the city's own planning apparatus split down the middle.
On April 7, 2015, the council voted 7-2 against it.
It found the road inconsistent with both the adopted land-use plan and the Burton Station Strategic Growth Area plan, and it directed the city manager not to permit that road inside Virginia Beach.
The road that stops at the city line
With the crossing refused, the whole approach had to fit inside Norfolk.
Premium Outlets Boulevard came north off Northampton Boulevard, which was widened and given new traffic signals.
The new road stayed in Norfolk along the boundary, and Virginia Beach planning documents later referred to its truncation by Norfolk.
Norfolk's Wastewater Utility Fund covered $2.5 million in sewer improvements, separate from the $11.8 million infrastructure total.
That work included a sanitary sewer, force main and pump station; the wider site work also covered grading, drainage and lighting.
Norfolk still owns the pump station beside the shopping center.
The formal construction start came on June 2, 2016, and the work ran 12 months.
Seven buildings went up on 53 acres, 332,000 square feet of leasable space, well short of the 450,000 the city had described.
Norfolk Premium Outlets opens with 50 stores
Norfolk Premium Outlets opened on Thursday, June 29, 2017, an open-air outlet center at 1600 Premium Outlets Boulevard in Norfolk, Virginia, on part of the ground the golf course had used.
About 50 shops and restaurants were trading that day. The leasing plan called for 85 to 90.
The center was built to face the water. A boardwalk and a pier run along the Lake Wright side, with a gazebo and seating turned toward the lake.
Lake Wright is part of Norfolk's reservoir system, and the city keeps it closed to the public, shore fishing included.
The outlets look at it. Nobody gets in.
Filling the rest of the leases took years. Simon reported the center 87.8 percent occupied at the end of 2018, and 99.2 percent at the end of 2025.
Virginia Beach apartments need Norfolk's pump station
Ten years after the road fight, Virginia Beach had another case at the same boundary.
Concorde Apts LP proposed 180 apartments on 6.3 vacant acres southwest of 5945 Burton Station Road.
Norfolk Premium Outlets LLC owned the light-industrial parcel, which had no direct access to a public street.
On September 10, 2025, the Planning Commission recommended the rezoning and frontage variance 10-0.
No one spoke against them. By January 2026, the project had zoning approval.
In 2015, City Council had rejected the commission's recommendation for a road across the line. The apartment project made it through.
Then the boundary came back.
The apartments are in Virginia Beach, and their planned sewer connection runs to Norfolk, through the city-owned pump station beside the outlet center.
On March 10, 2026, Norfolk City Council voted 7-1 to let the 180 units and their clubhouse connect to it, off Premium Outlets Boulevard at Pritchard Street.
The outlets are open seven days a week now, 10 to 8 Monday through Thursday, 10 to 9 Friday and Saturday, and 11 to 7 Sunday, with 75-plus stores.
Shoppers still get in on a boulevard that stops at the city line. The apartments approved on the far side of it will drain back into Norfolk.
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