On the night of July 17, a city crew closed Leslie Road between Columbia Park Trail and Gage Boulevard and worked until 8 a.m. the next morning, grinding and resurfacing the pavement in two overnight shifts. Before they got there, they ran a test patch a few blocks over on Jericho Court, the small residential street that gives this hillside pocket of south Richland its name. That test run was part of the city's 2026 Pavement Preservation Program, and it's a small detail, but it's the kind of small detail that tells you something bigger is happening below this neighborhood than a single repaving job.
What's actually happening is this: Queensgate Drive, the road that has always felt like the hillside's back door, is finally closing a gap it's had for years. And the retail filling in around that gap, a new ice cream shop, a discount store in a space that sat empty for months, a commercial building going up at the corner of Queensgate and Keene, isn't the reason the corridor is changing. It's the result of the corridor changing. If you've lived here a while, you've probably had the road backward.
The road was never supposed to dead-end here
For years, getting from the Jericho Heights hillside to south Kennewick meant backtracking through central Richland, because Queensgate Drive simply didn't connect all the way through. That's the gap that's closing now, as construction finishes the final undeveloped stretch of Queensgate Drive, linking central Richland via the Duportail Bridge straight to south Kennewick. Local radio coverage called it exactly what it is for anyone who's timed that drive: a genuine change to how traffic moves between the two cities, not just a cosmetic paving project.
The road completion is riding along the edge of a larger project called the Terraces at Queensgate South, roughly 48 acres of new housing and commercial space being developed by BrickWise Homes. The first phase alone is bringing more than 100 housing units and neighborhood retail into the corridor, and BrickWise is already marketing townhomes there priced from the upper $300s. A second phase is planned to add more commercial space, possibly including apartments, with the developer's team predicting that most of the consumer-facing retail, restaurants, shops, and offices, will end up concentrated along Keene Road specifically, the same stretch that runs directly below the hillside.
There's one more piece that matters if you drive this corridor regularly: the road plan includes a roundabout that will eventually connect Queensgate Drive to the south side of Badger Mountain. That's not a small detail either. It means the loop that currently forces you toward central Richland or back out to Keene Road is going to open into a more direct connection toward the mountain itself, the same open space that's already the reason a lot of people chose this hillside in the first place.
The storefronts are catching up, not leading
Once you see the road as the actual story, the retail news reads differently. None of it is random. It's filling in behind a corridor that's becoming a through-route instead of a cluster you have to circle back out of.
A few concrete examples from this year:
- Sunset Ridge Square, a new 14,000-square-foot commercial building at 1000 Queensgate Drive, broke ground in early July at the intersection of Queensgate Drive and Keene Road. One restaurant tenant is already committed, with additional retail space still open, and the first phase is expected to open in early 2027.
- Cold Stone Creamery, the Tri-Cities' first location for the chain, filed permits in February to convert a former beauty salon space at 2560 Queensgate Drive, in the strip mall that already holds Kadlec Express Care and Sake Express Sushi & Teriyaki, near the STCU branch and Spanky's car wash. It opened in early May.
- Five Below moved into the former Party City space at Vintner Square after acquiring dozens of Party City leases at auction when that chain dissolved through bankruptcy. It's the company's first Pacific Northwest presence, and the Richland location was one of seven the company picked up across the state.
A commercial broker involved in marketing land near this same intersection put it bluntly to the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business: this is, in his words, "the place to be now." He wasn't talking about a single store. He was talking about a corner that had already proven it could pull consistent traffic, and was about to pull more once the road finished connecting through.
None of these businesses picked this stretch of Queensgate because it was a destination on its own. They picked it because the road work made it one.
The trailhead was here before any of it
It's worth separating what's new from what's simply always been part of daily life on this hillside, because the two get blended together in a lot of generic write-ups. Badger Mountain itself isn't part of this year's news cycle. The Badger Mountain Preserve was established back in 2005 specifically to protect open space close to town as development kept advancing on it, and the trailhead park's lower parking lot sits at the corner of Queensgate Drive and White Bluffs Street, a five-minute drive or less from most of the hillside.
What is worth knowing if you haven't paid close attention: the Badger Mountain Challenge, an ultramarathon hosted by the Nomad Trail Runners of Eastern Washington, ran its 15th edition this past March, with distances from a 15K up to a full 100 miles, all starting and finishing from that same trailhead lot. It's volunteer-run, it's been going for over a decade, and Friends of Badger Mountain requires leashes on the trail year-round, race weekend or not. If you walk a dog up there on a regular Tuesday, that's the rule that applies to you too.
The point isn't that the mountain changed. It's that the mountain has been quietly anchoring this hillside the whole time the road below it was catching up, and now the road is finally built to actually connect to it.
What this actually changes if you already live here
Put the pieces together and the shift is less about any one new business and more about which direction your errands naturally point. For years, this hillside's daily loop ran outward toward central Richland or looped back through Keene Road to get anywhere useful. As Queensgate finishes its connection through the Duportail Bridge to south Kennewick, and as the roundabout toward Badger Mountain South gets built, that loop straightens out. The corridor stops being a cluster you exit from and starts being a route you pass through, with more of what you need filling in along the way rather than requiring a separate trip.
That's a different kind of change than "a new restaurant opened." It's a change in the shape of the drive itself, and it's happening in real time this year, not as a five-year projection. The pavement crew testing new surfacing on Jericho Court before rolling it down Leslie Road wasn't a coincidence of scheduling. It's what it looks like when a city invests in a corridor at the street level while the bigger road and retail pieces around it are still being finished.
If you've noticed the cones, the graders, or the new signage going up at Queensgate and Keene this year, you weren't imagining a random cluster of unrelated projects. You were watching a road finally do the job it was supposed to do a decade ago, with the businesses and homes around it filling in behind that completion.
For those of us who've spent years watching this stretch of south Richland grow, that's the kind of detail that changes how you think about the neighborhood, not because it's dramatic, but because it's the actual mechanism behind everything else you've been noticing.
If you're weighing a move within this hillside or just want a clear-eyed read on how a specific street or lot fits into what's coming, Laura & Wes Hodges know this corridor block by block. Receive listings in your inbox and we'll keep you posted as the pieces around Queensgate and Keene keep filling in.
