In late February 2026, a contractor working for the Port of Kennewick hauled away about two dump trucks of soil from a five-foot-wide spot on Lot 31 at Vista Field. A sample from that spot had come back slightly above the state's allowable limit for PFAS, the synthetic chemicals found in everything from firefighting foam to non-stick pans. The port paused lot sales, ordered a full environmental review of the site, and waited. By mid-June 2026, Washington's Department of Ecology sent back a no further action letter: no PFAS above allowable limits remain anywhere on the property. Lot sales resumed. As of the port's most recent update, three to four new businesses have inquired about locating there since the cleanup cleared.
That five-foot patch of dirt is a footnote now. But it's a useful place to start, because Vista Field is the strangest, newest thing to hit the Kennewick housing market in years, and understanding what it actually is tells you something the citywide median price cannot: that "Kennewick" isn't one market. It's at least three, wearing the same zip code.
An Airport Becomes a Neighborhood
Vista Field used to be a municipal airport. The Port of Kennewick shut down flight operations more than a decade ago and spent years running a community planning process to figure out what should replace 103 acres of runway near Columbia Center Mall. The answer, worked out with DPZ CoDesign and adopted as the Vista Field Master Plan, is a walkable town center built the way older downtowns were built, before wide setbacks and cul-de-sacs became the default. Small-scale streets. Homes stacked near shops. A linear water feature, a bosque of trees, pedestrian bridges.
The builder chosen to execute the residential piece is BlueChart Homes, a joint venture between Levi Holmes, who has entitled or built more than 2,000 residential units around the region, and Benjamin Paulus, a third-generation homebuilder. Their deal with the port covers up to 300 single-family, attached, and rowhouse homes across eight phases, with a design library requiring at least 12 distinct home styles and 36 variations, so the finished streets don't read as a single production run.
The first phase is priced in a way that tells you something about the land underneath it, if not yet the finished homes. BlueChart agreed to pay the port $80,000 per finished lot in Phase 1 and $82,500 per lot in Phase 2. That's the builder's cost to acquire buildable ground inside the Vista Field footprint, not a retail price for a completed house. But it's a real number, and it's useful: it tells you the port priced this land to get density and walkability built quickly, not to extract maximum land value up front. The finished homes, when they list, will carry construction costs, design-library premiums, and Vista Field's location next to the Three Rivers Convention Center and Toyota Center on top of that lot cost.
The timeline has already moved once. Port officials said back in 2025 that lots for the first phase would be ready by the end of June 2026, with building permits to follow around July, putting the very first houses under construction by the summer of 2026. The PFAS pause pushed that back. As of the port's most recent public update, in early September 2026, phase one infrastructure, the streets, sidewalks, and utilities that have to go in before BlueChart can pour a foundation, is being funded through the port's 2027-2028 budget cycle. Port CEO Tim Arntzen has said BlueChart is ready to build as soon as that infrastructure lands. The initial neighborhood is planned at around 28 to 32 homes, sited just west of the existing mixed-use core, within walking distance of the port's fountains and pedestrian bridges. But a buyer asking "when can I move into Vista Field" is really asking a port infrastructure budget question first and a homebuilding question second.
Port Deputy CEO Tana Bader-Inglima has described the ambition directly:
"The vision is to have an urban town center. It's much more like the older downtowns used to develop where you have smaller scale streets."
That vision is the product. It is not a suburban subdivision with a new name. It's smaller lots, shared public space, and a bet that buyers will trade yard size for walkability to a mall, an arena, and a convention center. Whether that bet pays off in resale value is not yet knowable, because no homes have closed there. But it means comparing a future Vista Field listing to a typical Kennewick tract home on price per square foot alone will mislead you before you've even toured either one.
What the Rest of Kennewick's Median Is Actually Made Of
Meanwhile, the rest of the city has kept selling homes the way it always has, and the numbers a buyer sees on a portal search blend all of it into a single figure. Depending on the month and the source, Kennewick's citywide median has sat somewhere between roughly $410,000 and $450,000 through the middle of 2026. That range itself is a clue. A market moving in a tight, predictable band from source to source is a market with enough transaction volume to average out noise. That's the established Kennewick housing stock: tract subdivisions, ranch homes, the occasional golf-course lot.
Zoom into specific established neighborhoods and the picture splits further. Single-family homes in Canyon Lakes, built around the golf course on the city's south side, have carried a median price near $605,000 this year. A few minutes away in Hansen Park, the median for comparable single-family homes has run close to $597,500. Both numbers sit well above the citywide median, which means the citywide figure is being pulled down by a much larger volume of lower-priced tract homes, townhomes, and manufactured housing elsewhere in the city.
Regionally, the broader four-city Tri-Cities market, which includes Kennewick, Pasco, Richland, and West Richland together, posted a median sale price of $445,000 in June 2026, the tightest and fastest month of the year, with median days on market falling to just 20. That's useful backdrop. It tells you Kennewick isn't cooling relative to its neighbors. It's just being reported as one number when it's really several.
Here's how those numbers actually break down when you separate the products being sold rather than averaging them together:
| Submarket | The Product | Recent Price Signal | What It Actually Tells a Buyer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vista Field | Brand-new, walkable urban infill on a former airport; smaller lots, design-library homes; phase one infrastructure now funded through the port's 2027-2028 budget | Builder lot cost of $80,000-$82,500 per lot in Phase 1 and 2; no finished-home sales yet | You're buying proximity and walkability, not square footage, and the timeline depends on port infrastructure funding as much as the builder. |
| Canyon Lakes / Hansen Park | Established, golf-course-adjacent single-family subdivisions | Single-family median near $605,000 and $597,500 respectively in 2026 | Premium for mature lots and an established location pulls these well above the citywide blend. |
| Citywide Kennewick | Blend of tract homes, condos, townhomes, and manufactured housing across every era of construction | Roughly $410,000-$450,000 depending on source and month in 2026 | This is an average of very different housing types. It's the least useful number for comparing any two specific neighborhoods. |
| Downtown Kennewick | Small, thin market dominated by early-1900s craftsman cottages, with occasional high-value outliers | Trailing three-month median of $1.4 million through April 2026, up 34.1% year over year | With so few closings in a given quarter, one or two higher-value sales can swing the reported median dramatically. It's not evidence that a typical downtown craftsman now costs seven figures. |
The Downtown Number Is a Warning About Small Samples, Not a Price Floor
That last row deserves its own explanation, because a 34% year-over-year jump sounds like a neighborhood on fire. It's really a lesson in how medians behave when transaction counts are low. Downtown Kennewick's housing stock leans heavily on homes built in the 1930s, the kind of restored craftsman cottage you'll find listed with original glass doors, built-in bookcases, and an oversized lot near 1st Avenue. Those homes trade in small numbers. When a market only sees a handful of closings in a rolling three-month window, one unusually large sale, a riverfront estate lot or a substantial renovation, can move the reported median more than actual buyer demand would suggest. A downtown market posting a $1.4 million median isn't telling you every craftsman cottage there costs that much. It's telling you the sample size is small enough that the median isn't doing the job a median is supposed to do.
What This Means If You're Actually Comparing Neighborhoods
If you're weighing Kennewick against itself, the practical takeaway is to stop asking what "Kennewick" costs and start asking what specific product you're buying:
- If you want new construction and walkability to the entertainment district around Toyota Center and Three Rivers Convention Center, Vista Field is the only place in the city offering that right now, and pricing will follow the builder's lot costs plus construction, not the citywide median.
- If you want an established, golf-adjacent single-family home with a resale track record, Canyon Lakes and Hansen Park sit meaningfully above the citywide figure, and that gap is the real cost of buying into a mature, well-known subdivision rather than a newer or lower-cost pocket of the city.
- If you're looking downtown for historic character, treat the headline median as noise. Look at what actually closed, not the average of a handful of sales.
None of this makes one choice better than another. It makes the citywide median close to useless for deciding between them, which is exactly the kind of local read a portal search won't give you.
A Few Questions Buyers Ask
Is it safe to buy at Vista Field after the PFAS issue? The Washington Department of Ecology issued a no further action letter in June 2026 confirming no PFAS above allowable limits remain on the site, after the port removed the affected soil in February. The port has also commissioned a new Phase 1 Environmental Report covering the entire property.
How much will a finished Vista Field home actually cost? No homes have sold there yet. What's known is the builder's cost per lot, $80,000 to $82,500 in the first two phases, which is the land cost before construction, design, and finish work are added.
Is downtown Kennewick really a million-dollar market now? The reported median reflects a very small number of closings over a rolling three-month window. It's a sign of thin transaction volume, not a new price floor for the neighborhood's craftsman housing stock.
Comparing neighborhoods inside one city takes more than a single median price, especially in a market with a new urban core still under construction, established subdivisions carrying their own premiums, and a historic downtown too thin on sales to average cleanly. If you're trying to figure out which part of Kennewick actually fits your budget and your list, Gavin Vargas can walk you through what's really selling where, lot by lot, before you make an offer based on a number that was never describing the home you're looking at.
