Sisters housing project to break ground

Published 12:00 am Thursday, October 22, 2015

A developer plans to break ground this morning on phase one of a 20-acre, 100-home project in northeast Sisters with prices starting around $350,000.

The design for ClearPine, on property that once served as the log deck for the former Lundgren Mill, is inspired by NorthWest Crossing, the West Bend Property Co. subdivision in Bend, developer Peter Hall said. Hall owns the Sisters property; phase one plans for 14 single-family homes.

In fact, the designer — Doug Macy, of Portland firm Walker Macy — is the same urban planner and architect who designed NorthWest Crossing.

“We sort of got a reputation for being able to put together really nice community-based plans,” Macy said Wednesday. “People call us all the time and say, ‘We want to do something much like NorthWest Crossing.’”

However, NorthWest Crossing is hundreds of acres, with several varieties of housing styles and acres of parks and other amenities.

The Sisters property posed a challenge in designing the kind of amenities Hall was after, Macy said. He said he basically created a scaled-down version of NorthWest Crossing for Hall’s ClearPine. The master plan lists four approved styles in the subdivision: craftsman, prairie, midcentury modern and American foursquare, Hall said. The plan also calls for a central park and some homes built close to the street, with alley access to garages.

“The homes are going to be a fair amount less expensive than they are on the west side of Bend,” Hall said Wednesday, “but they’re going to have the feel of NorthWest Crossing.”

Town houses or cottages will occupy about 25 of the lots, Hall said. The project also must dedicate eight lots to affordable housing, available to buyers or tenants making at most 80 percent of area median income, said Patrick Davenport, Sisters’ community development director. Hall has two years to build the affordable homes from the day he obtains his first building permit, which Davenport said the city might issue any day now.

The project, despite being relatively small in scale, is a significant one for the city, where few new subdivisions come up, Davenport said. “This is a really big deal.”

Hall said he expects to attract homebuyers ready for a step up from entry-level homes and retirees from Eugene to Seattle looking for less expensive and quieter homes. He estimated listing prices for phase one starting around $350,000; the cottages and town houses will list in the high $200,000s.

“I think there will be houses up in the $500,000s and $600,000s in the later phases,” he said.

The property, purchased by Hall in 2005, was formerly zoned industrial. Streets, water and sewer lines and other infrastructure are already in place. Hall plans a model home and several homes built on speculation, but the remainder will be custom built, he said.

— Reporter: 541-617-7815, jditzler@bendbulletin.com