More than four years after Pahlisch Homes received approval to construct 2,000 single-family homes, townhomes and triplexes in Northeast Bend, the developer is tweaking its construction strategy. It now wants to build smaller homes that will be more attractive to buyers.

Planning amendments tentatively granted by the Bend City Council Wednesday will allow smaller quadplexes of about 1,000-square-feet per unit.

They will also allow for a slight delay in road and roundabout projects, a move needed to avoid any hitch in home building momentum.

The amendments will need final approval from the council at a future meeting.

When master plans were submitted to the city in 2020, Pahlisch Homes, residential developer of Petrosa and Easton communities, attempted to forecast which types of houses would sell, and how quickly, over the next decade, said Joey Shearer, a planning consultant with a firm hired by the developer.

”Surprise, surprise, we weren’t perfect at it,” Shearer said.

He told the city planning commission last month that the proposed amendments are a creative solution to provide additional housing options that try to match up with the demand Pahlisch is seeing.

“These amendments allow Pahlisch to continue building housing without doing a pause to kind of construct some improvements before they’re actually required,” Shearer told the council Wednesday.

With some exceptions, Bend requires community a master plan for properties under common ownership totaling more than 20 acres.

The Petrosa Master Plan, the framework for a 190-acre neighborhood near Butler Market Road and Eagle road, includes 1,145 new units and complete with trails, parks, 20-acres of commercial space and a new elementary school — plus the required roundabouts and street connections needed to keep pace with a growing population.

Read more: Bend-La Pine makes ‘proactive’ land buy for new school in unbuilt development

More than 500 units at Petrosa are already built. It’s one of the fastest-growing planned communities in Bend, according to Shearer’s consulting firm, AKS Engineering and Forestry.

As Pahlisch finishes the fifth of eight phases, the current plan requires construction of a road extension prior to starting the sixth phase, which includes about 100 more lots.

As part of the proposed amendments, Pahlisch can plat and build about half of those before it would need to extend Yeoman Road and add a roundabout. Developers have already submitted infrastructure plans and expect to complete roadwork by fall 2025.

“When phase four was being constructed, the pace of folks moving to Bend and purchasing homes was much greater even than we anticipated when we submitted the master plan application,” Shearer said. “What we’re experiencing now, with interest rates and everything else, that absorption has slowed.”

That delay shouldn’t cause a transportation issue, Shearer said. But the roundabout and street extension are eventually necessary to ease congestion, as detailed by an earlier transportation study on Petrosa, Shearer said.

Some planning commissioners expressed concern last month that continuing to build homes without also bringing transportation infrastructure at the rate originally stated in the master plan could, in the event of a market crash, leave residents and the city stranded without key roads.

Read more: Pahlisch Homes’ sale of commercial property won’t derail Petrosa local market plans

To prevent that, the city bonded $12 million — an engineer’s estimate — to the upcoming transportation corridor improvements at Petrosa, ensuring funding to complete the project should developers happen to walk away.

“There is no intention of the project stopping,” Shearer said.

Shift to smaller housing

Currently, townhomes are the bulk of the smaller, more affordable homes at Petrosa. But they haven’t sold as expected.

Developers will shift to building village-style homes — a grouping of four units, three of which share a single driveway connection to the public street. Ana Bozich, community and planning director at Pahlisch, told the planning commission last month that the smaller homes, which span 900 to 1,000 square feet apiece, are about one-third slimmer than the smallest option currently available at Petrosa.

“We’re just trying to offer another product in the market that we’re not seeing,” Bozich said.

Tentative approval by the council on Wednesday will allow the first quadplexes at Petrosa and the nearby Easton Master Plan, also under development by Pahlisch. The new style won’t increase housing density or impact infrastructure, said Karen Swenson, senior planner with the city of Bend.

Multiple unit housing must comprise 33% of housing at Easton and about 40% of units at Petrosa, according to the master plans.

“They’re still keeping to what was initially promised, they’re just tweaking it to allow a different type of housing,” Swenson said.