Search for a new home near Kennewick's Columbia Center Mall right now and you will not find much. Not because nothing is being built. Vista Field, the 103-acre former municipal airport a few blocks from the mall, is in the middle of the largest land deal in the Port of Kennewick's 110-year history. The airport closed to planes at the end of 2013, and the port has spent the years since turning the runway into streets, a linear park, a water feature and public plazas for what it calls a regional town center. Homes are coming. Up to 300 of them, in fact.
What you won't find is a normal shopping experience. And that, more than the size of the lots, is the detail worth understanding if you're comparing Vista Field to the rest of Kennewick.
One builder, not a market
Everywhere else in Kennewick, you're choosing among however many sellers happen to have a house on the market that week. According to the Tri-Cities Business News, at Vista Field, for at least the first five phases of the project, you're choosing among the design options offered by a single homebuilder.
The Port of Kennewick's board approved an agreement in March 2025 with BlueChart Homes, a joint venture between Levi Holmes of Chartwell Land Company in Silverdale and Benjamin Paulus of Blue Fern and Teak Construction in Redmond. As part of that deal, the port agreed to pause marketing single-family opportunities at Vista Field to any other developer for the length of BlueChart's first five phases, giving the builder room to establish itself without competing offers on the same land. BlueChart, in turn, committed to a design library of at least 12 home styles and 36 variations. Vista Field's available-parcel page says all are subject to review by the port's design consultant and governed by the Vista Field Design Standards and mandatory owners associations.
That's not unusual for a master-planned community. But it's a real shift for anyone used to shopping Kennewick's resale market, where the median home sold for $432,000 over the three months ending in May 2026, up 2.8% from the same period a year earlier, and typically found a buyer in about 41 days. In that market, you're negotiating with dozens of independent sellers, each pricing against the others. At Vista Field, for the foreseeable future, you're negotiating with one.
What the smaller lots actually cost
The affordability pitch for Vista Field centers on lot size. The Yakima Herald reported that current zoning caps the single-family lots at 5,000 square feet, well below the typical suburban lot, and port officials have been direct about why that matters to them.
"Vista Field's smaller lots will also build affordability into housing," said Amber Hanchette, the port's director of real estate, when the BlueChart agreement was announced.
Here's what that affordability actually looks like on paper. BlueChart agreed to pay the port a fixed $80,000 per finished lot in the first neighborhood of 32 homes, and $82,500 per lot in the second. Later phases move to a formula-based price. Of whatever BlueChart pays, 15% is set aside to fund additional public gathering spaces inside the neighborhoods themselves.
Two things stand out. First, that $80,000 to $82,500 figure is the price of raw, finished land. It says nothing about what a completed home costs once BlueChart builds on it, since the builder hasn't published broad retail pricing while the port's marketing pause is in effect. Second, the "affordability" argument is really about density, not about the finished product being cheap. Smaller lots let the port fit more homes onto the same 103 acres, which supports the vision of a walkable, transit-friendly district. Whether that translates into a lower price than a comparable resale home elsewhere in Kennewick is something buyers won't be able to verify until BlueChart starts publishing home prices alongside those lot costs.
If you're cross-shopping, the honest way to think about it: you're not comparing sticker prices yet. You're comparing a promise about density and walkability against a citywide market where, as of July 2026, the median Kennewick home sold for around $410,000 to $432,000 depending on the source and window, at roughly $246 per square foot.
The year the project quietly paused
There's a second piece of friction worth knowing if you're watching this development closely: construction didn't proceed on the timeline anyone expected.
The original schedule called for lots to be ready by the end of June 2026, with building permits following that July. But in 2025, soil samples collected during construction on Lot 31 turned up trace amounts of PFAS, the synthetic chemicals sometimes called "forever chemicals" because they persist in the environment, slightly above allowable limits in a small area about five feet across. The port paused additional construction and utility work while it investigated.
That investigation wrapped up this year. In June 2026, the port announced it had removed about two dump trucks of affected soil and received a formal no-further-action letter from the Washington State Department of Ecology, confirming no remaining PFAS concerns anywhere at Vista Field. Lot sales and private development resumed shortly after.
For a buyer, the practical takeaway isn't alarm. It's context. Environmental due diligence at Vista Field has already happened at a site-wide level, and the port has a documented paper trail through the state to show it. If you're the kind of buyer who reads disclosure documents closely, and you should be, this is one place where the public record already answers the question before you have to ask it.
The commercial side is moving alongside housing
While the residential side worked through that pause, the commercial side of Vista Field kept moving. A five-story mixed-use building is now under construction on Lot 25, led by a private development team from Camas, with ground-floor commercial space, apartments on the middle floors and condominiums above. Separately, the port began negotiating with Columbia Point Eye Care in 2024 over a new 7,000-square-foot building on Lot 31, the same parcel where the soil issue later turned up.
That matters for how you read the neighborhood, because Vista Field sits directly adjacent to the Columbia Center Mall, the Three Rivers Convention Center and the Toyota Center, in what the port itself describes as the commercial core of the Tri-Cities. The residential product BlueChart is building isn't going into a quiet subdivision. It's going into a district that's simultaneously building five-story condos and courting a medical office tenant. That's a different growth trajectory than most single-family pockets of Kennewick, where new construction tends to be standalone subdivisions without ground-floor retail next door.
What this means if you're comparing Kennewick neighborhoods
If you're weighing Vista Field against a resale home elsewhere in Kennewick, here's the honest framing.
Vista Field offers something the rest of the city doesn't: brand-new construction inside walking distance of the mall, the convention center and an entertainment district, with public infrastructure the port has already paid for. What it doesn't offer, at least for now, is price transparency in the form you're used to. There's no broad multiple-listing inventory to compare, because the port structured the deal so that one builder controls the single-family product for the first five phases. You're pricing against a design library, not a market.
Kennewick's citywide numbers give you a baseline while you wait for BlueChart's pricing to become public. The city has historically priced at or near the bottom of the four largest Tri-Cities markets when compared against Pasco, Richland and West Richland, and that held again in 2025, when Kennewick was the only one of the four to post a year-over-year price drop before prices ticked back up heading into 2026. Whether Vista Field's finished homes land above or below that baseline is the open question, and it's one worth asking directly rather than assuming from the lot price alone.
If you want a second set of eyes on what a specific phase or lot means for your budget, that's exactly the kind of comparison I like to walk through with buyers before they commit to something new. You can reach me anytime through my contact page, or start with a broader look at buying in the Tri-Cities if you're still early in the process.
FAQ
Can I buy a home at Vista Field right now? The port cleared its PFAS concerns in June 2026 and lot sales and construction have resumed. Availability depends on which phase BlueChart is actively building, since the port's agreement gives the builder exclusivity on single-family product through phase five.
Are Vista Field's smaller lots actually cheaper than a typical Kennewick lot? The $80,000 to $82,500 figures are what BlueChart pays the port for finished land, not a retail home price. Until the builder publishes pricing for completed homes, there isn't a clean apples-to-apples comparison to the rest of Kennewick's resale market yet.
Is Vista Field zoned only for single-family homes? No. The master plan includes attached homes, row houses, townhomes, apartments and condominiums alongside commercial space, which is part of why a five-story mixed-use building is under construction on Lot 25 even as single-family lots are still being finished nearby.
Buying new construction in a district that's still being built out comes with questions that don't show up in a typical resale transaction. If you're weighing Vista Field against an established Kennewick neighborhood, I'm happy to walk through what each option actually means for your timeline and budget. Kelsie Knight is here to help you sort it out. Schedule a Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
