Drive Kennedy Road toward Duportail Street on a weekday evening right now and you'll hit cones, temporary signage, and a construction crew working on what will eventually be a roundabout. This is not a detour around Queensgate. This is Queensgate, in September 2026, mid-transition between the neighborhood buyers think they're getting and the neighborhood the city is still building the roads for.
If you've been comparing Richland neighborhoods and Queensgate keeps coming up as the newer-construction option in the $550,000 to $750,000 range, you've probably already clocked the obvious selling point: Costco. What's less visible from a listing photo is that the retail draw pulling you toward Queensgate is the same reason the intersections around it are currently torn up, and that project has a specific, dated finish line that hasn't arrived yet.
The Corner That Already Sold You On Queensgate
The Richland Costco opened its doors at 3125 Queensgate Drive on August 8, 2025, tucked behind the Target-anchored Vintner Square shopping center that also includes Grocery Outlet, Five Guys, Stick + Stone, and Bath & Body Works. According to reporting from the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business, the finished warehouse came in close to one-fifth larger than the Kennewick store on Gage Boulevard, which runs about 155,000 square feet. That scale alone tells you this wasn't a small infill project. It was built to serve growth the city expected to keep happening in south Richland.
For a buyer, that Costco is already a fact on the ground. It's open, it's stocked, and it's the retail anchor a lot of Queensgate marketing leans on. What that marketing tends to leave out is what it took, and is still taking, to get the surrounding street grid ready for the traffic that anchor brings in.
What The City Didn't Advertise When Costco Signed The Lease
Richland's own traffic estimates projected the Costco and its fueling station would add roughly 450 additional vehicle trips per day to the Queensgate area during peak evening hours. That number became the basis for a $5.2 million infrastructure package the city has been designing and building since before the store opened.
The plan calls for a roundabout at the Kennedy Road and Duportail Street intersection, a second roundabout near the Vintner Square driveway on Duportail, additional turn lanes, and signal modifications where Queensgate Drive meets Duportail. Richland's public works director described the Kennedy-Duportail intersection as a high-capacity driveway that already saw more than its share of crashes from drivers making impatient turns, which is the specific problem the roundabout is meant to fix.
Costco itself covered a meaningful share of the cost. Permit records show the company paid the city nearly $1.1 million in traffic impact fees for the warehouse and another roughly $470,000 tied to the fueling station. The rest of the $5.2 million comes from a $1.5 million grant through the state Transportation Improvement Board's Urban Arterial Program, $1.5 million in Benton County Rural Capital funds, and local real estate excise tax revenue.
Here's the part that matters if you're house hunting this fall: as of January 2026, the city confirmed construction on the first roundabout, at Kennedy and Duportail, was scheduled to begin June 1. Add the roughly six-month construction window the city outlined last year, and that puts a realistic completion sometime around the end of 2026 or into early 2027, assuming no delays from utility relocations or property acquisitions, both of which the project's own engineers flagged as risks.
| Project milestone | Status as of September 2026 |
|---|---|
| Costco warehouse and fuel station | Open since August 8, 2025 |
| Traffic impact fees paid by Costco | Roughly $1.1M (warehouse) + $470K (fuel station) |
| Kennedy-Duportail roundabout | Construction underway, started June 1, 2026 |
| Vintner Square Driveway-Duportail roundabout | Part of same $5.2M package, design phase |
| Estimated full completion | Late 2026 to early 2027, pending no delays |
So the premium you're paying for a Queensgate address already assumes a finished intersection. That intersection is not finished. It's under active construction right now, with a completion window that's realistic but not guaranteed.
The Neighborhood Rising Around The Detour
The roadwork isn't happening in isolation. A short distance from the Costco site, a development called The Terraces at Queensgate South is underway on land near the corner of Queensgate Drive and Keene Road. Filings describe a project of roughly 48 to 50 acres, starting with 89 townhomes and 19 single-family homes, developed by BrickWise Real Estate. A 4.7-acre commercial parcel on the edge of that development was listed at $4.8 million, positioned for restaurants and neighborhood retail once utilities and the Queensgate Drive extension are in place.
That extension matters beyond this one project. It's the final connection linking central Richland, across the Duportail Bridge, to south Kennewick. A separate roundabout planned as part of the Terraces at Queensgate South infrastructure is designed to eventually extend Queensgate Drive south toward Badger Mountain South. In other words, the construction you're driving through this month isn't one project fixing one Costco problem. It's several overlapping road projects serving a stretch of south Richland that's growing on multiple fronts at once.
What This Actually Means If You're Comparing Richland Neighborhoods
Richland's citywide median sale price sat at $505,000 as of July 2026, and new construction listings across the city carried a median around $525,000. Queensgate homes routinely land above both figures, largely because the neighborhood offers what older Richland subdivisions don't: newer builds, HOA-maintained common areas, and now, direct proximity to a major retail anchor.
That premium is real and it's not going away. But it's worth separating what you're buying today from what you'll be living through for the next several months. If your daily commute runs through Kennedy and Duportail, you're going to hit active construction on a semi-regular basis until that roundabout is finished. If it doesn't, and your route into and out of the neighborhood uses Queensgate Drive itself or the Truman Avenue side streets behind Target, where the city already added speed humps to discourage cut-through traffic, your day-to-day experience of the construction will be lighter.
A few questions worth asking before you write an offer in this part of Richland:
- Which specific route does this home's daily commute use, and does it cross Kennedy-Duportail or Vintner Square Driveway?
- Is the property within The Terraces at Queensgate South footprint, where road access is still being built out alongside the homes themselves?
- Has the seller or listing agent disclosed any awareness of ongoing city construction near the property, beyond what's visible in photos?
- What's the realistic timeline gap between your expected move-in date and the city's projected roundabout completion window?
None of these questions should scare you off Queensgate. They should just make sure you know whether you're buying into a corridor that's mostly finished or one that's still catching up to its own growth.
A Couple of Direct Questions
Will home values in Queensgate keep climbing once the roundabouts are finished? There's no way to promise future appreciation, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we can say is that the traffic mitigation work is specifically designed to fix a documented capacity and safety problem at Kennedy and Duportail, which should make the corridor easier to live with day to day once it wraps.
Should I wait until construction is done to buy in this area? That depends entirely on your own timeline and how much day-to-day construction disruption you're willing to tolerate. Some buyers prefer to lock in a home now, before the finished roads potentially draw more competition. Others would rather wait and see the corridor in its completed state. Either approach is reasonable, and it's worth talking through with an agent who knows exactly which streets are affected and which aren't.
Is the Costco itself a nuisance for nearby homeowners, or a benefit? Most of what we hear from residents in the area is that having a second Costco in Richland, rather than driving to Kennewick, has been a convenience. The tradeoff is the traffic and construction that came with building it, which the city is actively working through right now.
If you're weighing a move into Queensgate, or comparing it against Meadow Springs, Badger Mountain, or Horn Rapids on the other side of Richland, the honest answer depends on your commute, your patience for a construction season, and your timeline. That's exactly the kind of conversation Desert Edge Realty Group has with buyers every week. Reach out and we'll walk you through what a specific address in this corridor actually looks like right now, cones and all.
