Five storefronts opened on the Queensgate Drive and Keene Road corridor between January and August of this year. Separately, a proposal at the northwest corner of Queensgate Drive and Keene Road treats the road differently than everything built there before it. Where past construction on this stretch was built for people passing through in a car, the newest project on the table is the first to design around people crossing on foot or by bike.
If you live in Jericho Heights, you already know this corridor by function rather than name. It's the route to Costco, to Home Depot, to the Fairchild Cinemas parking lot. For most of the last decade, that's what it was for: big rectangular buildings set back from the road, built to be driven to rather than walked past. This year, that started to change in small, specific ways.
The five storefronts, in order
Business licenses filed with the city and a roundup published by the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business show a clear sequence of openings along Queensgate Drive and the connecting stretch of Duportail Street:
- January 2026 — Jamba Juice opened at 2727 Queensgate Drive
- January 2026 — Fiiz opened at 3159 Duportail St, its own take on the customizable soda-and-drink format
- April 2026 — Costa Vida opened at 3015 Duportail St, a Queensgate location for the fast-casual Mexican chain
- August 2026 — Cold Stone Creamery opened at 2560 Queensgate Drive, and Ground Support Coffee opened its third Tri-Cities location at 2210 Keene Road, joining its existing Pasco and Kennewick shops
None of these are destination restaurants in the sense of somewhere you'd plan an evening around. They're grab-and-go format, built for someone already in the car running errands who now has a reason to stop instead of drive past. That's a meaningful shift for a corridor that, until recently, offered almost nothing between the big-box anchors themselves.
The commercial buildout on this stretch hasn't stopped at food, either. A permit issued in March put an AutoZone under construction at 2851 Duportail St, on the corner of Kennedy Road, at a listed building cost of $881,649 for a 7,384-square-foot store. That project sits a few hundred feet from the Les Schwab Tire Center already on that corner, which tells you something about how this part of Queensgate still functions: half of it is filling in with quick-stop food, the other half is still filling in with the same auto-and-hardware retail that's anchored it for years.
What the corridor used to be for
The distinction matters because of what wasn't here before. Ground Support Coffee choosing Keene Road for its third Tri-Cities shop, after Pasco and Kennewick, is a bet that there's now enough daily foot and car traffic on this specific block to support a stand-alone coffee shop rather than routing everyone through a drive-through at the grocery anchor. Cold Stone Creamery opening a few blocks down on Queensgate Drive is a similar bet on the same stretch, made in the same month.
That's a different kind of growth than the corridor has seen before. The AutoZone and the Les Schwab next to it are built for a five-minute stop on the way somewhere else. A coffee shop and an ice cream shop opening within the same quarter are built for something closer to a habit: the same order, the same time of day, week after week. Nothing about a car-parts store creates that kind of repeat pattern. A coffee shop does.
The corner that's being built around a trail, not just a road
A Citizen Portal report on a Richland hearing examiner session offered the clearest evidence of that shift: the session reviewed a proposed drive-through coffee stand at the northwest corner of Queensgate Drive and Keene Road. According to the meeting record, the roughly 800-square-foot building was designed with a single drive-through lane sized for about ten vehicles, on a site zoned C1 next to parcels zoned C3, with part of the frontage and landscaping falling inside city right-of-way tied to a possible future widening of the road.
What stood out in that session wasn't the drive-through lane. It was what the applicant proposed around it: a raised crosswalk, added signage, and a pathway connection tying the site directly into the Keene Road trail. A nearby resident raised a specific concern during public comment about bicycle and vehicle interactions at the trail crossing, asking the city to ensure the coffee stand would not create a hazard where the trail crosses the site. Richland's planning manager, Mike Stevens, responded that similar signage and crossing treatments have already been used elsewhere along the Keene Road trail, and that Public Works and Parks would likely coordinate on the design.
That exchange is worth sitting with, because it's the first time a commercial project on this corridor has had to answer for a trail crossing at all. The Home Depot, the Costco, the AutoZone under construction now: none of those sit directly against a section of trail that Richland residents already use daily to get somewhere on foot or by bike. A coffee stand does, and the design conversation around it reflects that. The corridor is still being built primarily for cars, but for the first time, it's being built with the assumption that people on the Keene Road trail are also going to want what's there.
Why this corner specifically
None of this changes what the corridor is for on a Tuesday afternoon. It's still where you go for cat litter, tires, and a movie ticket. But the last eight months added something that wasn't there before: a coffee shop with two sister locations already proven out in Pasco and Kennewick, an ice cream shop a few blocks away, and a pending project that, for the first time, is negotiating with the city over how a car-focused development sits next to a trail that neighborhood residents already walk and bike.
If you're driving Queensgate to Costco this fall and it looks a little different than it did in January, that's not a coincidence. Five storefront openings in eight months on the same half-mile stretch are a specific, countable thing, not a general sense that the neighborhood is growing.
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This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
