Drive west on Sandifur Parkway through Pasco's Broadmoor district this month and you will pass roundabout after roundabout, subdivision after subdivision, and not one full-size grocery store. Ask a resident where they buy milk and the answer is almost always the same: Road 68, across the growth corridor, or across the river to WinCo at Columbia Point in Richland. For an area that has added thousands of new homes over the past several years, the absence has been the subject of local frustration for a long time.
The obvious explanation is that Broadmoor grew too fast for retailers to keep up. That is not quite what happened. The real explanation is closer to something a commercial broker put plainly to the Tri-City Herald earlier this year: retailers want rooftops, but rooftops need retail. Neither side wants to move first, so for years neither one did.
That standoff just broke, and understanding why matters more to a buyer weighing West Pasco right now than any single price point does.
Why Retail Waits
National grocery chains and restaurant groups do not build stores based on how a neighborhood feels. They underwrite based on a trade area's rooftop count, household income, and daily traffic within a fixed radius, and they will not commit capital until those numbers clear a threshold that makes the site's five-year performance predictable. Until recently, Broadmoor's numbers were moving in the right direction but had not crossed that line. Tim Ufkes, a commercial broker with Marcus & Millichap who has spent years marketing land on behalf of the Adams family, the longtime owners of much of the undeveloped acreage in the area, described the standoff this way:
"It's taken a lot longer than we ever thought it would. The retailers want houses. They want rooftops. But rooftops need retail."
That is the whole mechanism in two sentences. A neighborhood can add a thousand homes and still look, from a retailer's spreadsheet, like an unproven bet. What changes the math is not more houses alone. It is a data point that makes the trade area's future traffic and spending look more certain than it did a year earlier.
What Finally Moved the Needle
Two things happened in 2026 that gave retailers the confidence they'd been waiting for.
The first was the opening of the Pasco Aquatic Center on June 27 at 5204 Road 108, a $41 million civic facility that Ufkes himself flagged as a likely turning point. It is the kind of amenity that pulls in school groups and families from across the Tri-Cities on a regular basis, which converts Broadmoor from a residential subdivision into a destination with recurring foot traffic, exactly the kind of signal a grocery chain's real estate team watches for.
The second was demographic. Marketing materials circulated by Visconsi's listing broker put the West Pasco trade area's median household income at roughly 50 percent above the Pasco city average, a figure that reframes the area from an emerging market into what commercial underwriters call a primary-market trade area, meaning national tenants can pencil it in at the same terms they'd use in an established suburb rather than a speculative one.
Both signals landed at once, and two competing developers moved almost simultaneously.
- Riverbend Marketplace, submitted by Ohio-based Visconsi Companies in June 2026, is a 92-acre commercial hub anchored by a 63,000-square-foot grocery store, with a 124-room hotel, a gas station and car wash, and multiple restaurant pads. Visconsi's own project estimate runs $100 million to $150 million, and the company told the Tri-Cities Area Journal of Business that dirt could begin moving in early 2027.
- The Shops at Broadmoor, proposed by Elevated Property Co. under principal Fred Bruning, a developer with a track record that includes Whole Foods and Crate & Barrel-anchored projects, remains in letter-of-intent stage on a separate parcel facing Broadmoor Boulevard.
Two competing retail proposals showing up in the same year is itself a signal. Developers do not chase a market that looks uncertain, and they especially do not compete for the same corridor unless the underlying numbers have already convinced them the risk has shifted.
The Roads Were Already Paid For
None of this happens on land with no infrastructure, and that part of the story predates the retail announcements by years. In 2022, Pasco's city council approved close to a $40 million package of road and utility improvements for the Broadmoor area, funded through Tax Increment Financing, a mechanism that lets a city borrow against future increases in property tax revenue from a growth area rather than raising rates on current residents. The Broadmoor Master Plan covers the full 1,200-acre district, and the financing has already paid for the extension of Sandifur Parkway and the new stretch of Road 108, both of which now run directly past the future Riverbend site.
In other words, the city spent years building the roads a retailer would need before any retailer had committed to using them. That is unusual patience for a municipal budget, and it is part of why Pasco's city manager, Harold Stewart, described this as the payoff of infrastructure investments the city had been carrying for a long time.
What This Actually Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods
If you are cross-shopping West Pasco against a more built-out corridor like Queensgate in south Richland, where Target, Five Guys, and a full retail lineup have existed for years, the honest comparison is not price against price. It is finished against in progress. Pasco's citywide median sale price sat near $420,000 as of March 2026, which still runs lower than comparable pockets of Richland, and that gap exists in part because the neighborhood's retail infrastructure has been years behind its housing growth. Buying in West Pasco today means buying ahead of that gap closing, not after.
That trade works in a buyer's favor if the timeline is realistic. Visconsi's own estimate puts groundbreaking in early 2027, which means a grocery-anchored shopping center opening is still likely two to three years out from today, not a project landing next spring. Anyone buying in Broadmoor specifically because a grocery store is "about to open" should treat that as a multi-year horizon, not a near-term amenity.
What has already changed, and changed for good, is the underwriting. The Pasco Aquatic Center is open and drawing traffic now. The trade area's income profile is documented and circulating in front of national tenants. Two separate developers have staked real capital and reputational risk on the corridor in the same calendar year. The rooftop-versus-retail standoff that defined Broadmoor for years has a resolution date attached to it for the first time, even if that date is still ahead of us.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will home values in Broadmoor jump once Riverbend Marketplace breaks ground? Land values near a confirmed grocery-anchored project typically firm up as soon as a groundbreaking date is locked in, since that removes the biggest remaining uncertainty for future buyers. Retail projects with letters of intent still in place, like The Shops at Broadmoor, carry more risk of delay or redesign until a lease is signed.
Should I wait for the shopping center to open before buying in West Pasco? That depends on your timeline. If you plan to be in the home for five years or more, buying ahead of a two-to-three-year construction runway is a common strategy for capturing appreciation before an area's amenities catch up to its rooftops. If daily walkable retail matters to you right now, a built-out corridor will serve you better today.
Are there other parts of West Pasco with retail already in place? Areas closer to Road 68 and existing commercial nodes have grocery and restaurant access today. Broadmoor specifically has been the corridor without it, which is exactly why the Riverbend and Shops at Broadmoor announcements matter as much as they do.
If you're weighing West Pasco against another Tri-Cities corridor, or trying to figure out whether buying ahead of a development timeline makes sense for your situation, Jason Barrow Realty has spent more than two decades tracking exactly this kind of growth pattern across Kennewick, Richland, and Pasco. Contact us to talk through the timeline and what it means for your specific move.
