Beginning early next month, two restaurants at Sunriver Resort will close for several months as the resort revamps its food and beverage service.

The makeovers at Meadows at the Lodge and the Owl’s Nest pub are among $50 million in capital improvements that began at the resort in 2012, Libby Nations, Sunriver’s director of sales and marketing, said Tuesday.

Officials continue to refine concepts for the restaurants, she said, so specifics were not available. But the transformed dining locations will be ready for the summer season.

“We’ll share more of the details of the project over the next few months,” Nations said.

Both restaurants will remain available through New Year’s weekend, she said. Meadows’ last day is scheduled for Jan. 4 and Owl’s Nest’s, Jan. 9.

On Jan. 10, the Merchant Trader Café will become the new dining area, open for breakfast, lunch, dinner and cocktails, Nations said. The resort also plans to open The Grille at Crosswater four days a week.

Resort-wide renovations began with the guest rooms two years ago, she said. They moved outside and became more noticeable in 2013 with the opening of the resort’s beer garden in May and the dedication of Besson Commons in September, according to resort information.

Located adjacent to the main lodge, the commons features fire pits and bocce ball courts. It’s named for Col. Frank. S. Besson, commanding officer of Camp Abbot, the World War II training base that preceded the resort on the land 15 miles south of Bend.

The capital improvements also include The Cove, a 75,000-square-foot $3-million aquatic project. Construction began in September, the project manager told The Bulletin in October, and its features include a 3,200-square-foot pool, hot tub, restaurant and bar, other water features and a pond intended to create a habitat for the spotted frog.

The Cove, which will be available only to resort guests, is scheduled to be finished by Memorial Day.

After years of slogging back from a stubborn recession in Central Oregon, Crook County looks poised to have lost more jobs in 2014 than it gained.

Continuing a trend that’s seen across rural Oregon, Crook and Jefferson counties struggled to add private sector jobs through 11 months this year.

While Bend led the state’s rebounding economy in 2014, Crook County may shed nearly 100 jobs by year’s end after data from the state’s Employment Department released this week show the county fizzled toward the end of the year.

“Once recent layoffs are accounted for in the December figures, Crook County will finish the year with fewer jobs than where it started,” Central Oregon economist Damon Runberg wrote in his monthly report.

The state added nearly 44,000 jobs at a rate of 2.6 percent, the data show. The Bend area added nearly 3,000 jobs in the last year, a 4.4 percent rate. The wages for jobs in Bend are also growing faster than the state average.

Crook County, which has a total of about 5,600 non-farm jobs, added just 100 jobs from November 2013 through last month. Its unemployment rate remains above 10.2 percent.

The new report didn’t account for the more than 200 layoffs at Woodgrain Millwork in Prineville announced in late November. Woodgrain officials said they’d shutter some operations at the site after a roof collapsed under heavy snow. The county also lost 110 jobs from October to November this year, the data show.

The November figures show Jefferson County added 230 jobs over the last year, though most of them were public sector, local and tribal government jobs. At 9.4 percent, the unemployment rate in Jefferson County is higher than the state average of 7 percent.

State economists, who forecasted a good 2014 and strong start to 2015, are now looking to a period of net expansion where the state has added the jobs it lost to the recession and will begin adding jobs before the next recession comes.

“We’re not there yet. It’s been a slow recovery. From here on out we’re gonna see how many more jobs we can add,” state economist Josh Lehner said last week.

Bend 2030 has laid out a wide-ranging list of recommendations aimed at the city of Bend for resolving the housing affordability crisis.

While some of the suggestions could take years before coming to fruition, others are likely within reach in the short term, leaders of the group said.

The nonprofit, which is studying future livability in Bend, presented results from an online survey and October forum to the Bend City Council last week.

Members of the group echoed recommendations that were made in September by the city’s affordable housing advisory committee and added other ways the city could address the problem moving forward.

“It’s our hope that these (recommendations) come before the council as quickly as possible so we can start to see some easing of this crisis,” said Erin Foote Marlowe, vice-chair of the Bend 2030 board.

The recommendations suggest adding or amending city development codes to allow for greater density within the city limits, a shift that was met with strong support in an online survey and forum.

“This is kind of new for Bend,” said Marlowe, adding that the city has changed. “We’re more diverse and not so afraid of the density that may be coming.”

The city defines housing as affordable based on area median income. Affordable housing was defined in multiple ways in the Bend 2030 survey. The majority of the 1,145 participants stated that living in an affordable home in a nice neighborhood represented affordable housing. Others said lower rents, and 52 percent said being able to afford a home near their work.

About 84 percent of survey participants said that the lack of housing in Bend is either critical or extremely critical right now. Nearly 90 percent said the problem would be worse in the future.

“Mostly what we learned is people want to see aggressive and creative approaches to alleviating the problem,” said Marlowe, about the survey.

The affordable housing advisory committee presented two options for greater density to the Bend Planning Commission Monday.

The first option would be to implement a so-called “cottage code,” which would streamline development of small, single-family detached units around a common area on a half-acre or more. The proposal would remove the requirement for a conditional-use permit and would require at least four cottages with a common open space and a maximum of 14 cottages per development.

Although the code wouldn’t necessarily guarantee affordable housing, the density could bring the price down for each unit. Jim Long, the city’s affordable housing manager, told planning commissioners.

The change would allow developers to get creative, and affordable housing developers are “intrigued” by it, Long said. The type of development is currently allowed by the city, but the process to gain approval is time-consuming because of the required conditional-use permit.

“What we heard when we went out into the community is they would love a housing choice like this, but unfortunately it doesn’t exist because it’s so cumbersome to go through,” said Andy High, chairman of the advisory committee.

The committee also presented a possible density bonus for developers if they provide 50 percent of the units they build as affordable housing. The bonus allows developers to increase the typically allowed maximum of residences for a particular property.

The committee has also recommended amendments to city code for accessory dwelling units, which are garages or other portions of a house converted to a living space or an addition to a house. The proposal would allow the units to be 800 square feet instead of the currently allowed 600-square-foot limit and would remove the requirement of a conditional-use permit.

In addition, to allow greater density within the city, the committee recommended exempting developers from paying system development charges if they create affordable housing units. The fees are used to fund streets, sewers, parks and water.

The Bend 2030 survey found moderate support for the idea, while the forum held in October with 80 participants showed very little support.

Marlowe said Bend 2030 is still encouraging the city to look at SDC exemptions even though there has been mixed support because the survey found that residents are willing to find other ways to fill the gap.

Participants in the survey showed strong support for a small housing-affordability fee tacked on to water and sewer bills.

“We really want to encourage the city to consider these proposals because we did find support for them, and some people see them as crucial,” said Marlowe.

The housing affordability advisory committee will present the two main recommendations to the City Council in February. The change to accessory dwelling units is being considered by the city’s Urban Growth Boundary Remand Task Force.

Long said the affordability committee will present the proposed SDC exemption to the Bend Park & Recreation District in January.

Bend has long been a town of single-family homes, the public-policy term for traditional houses, arranged in rows and separated by yards.

The city is now charged with planning for the number of such houses to be built by developers through 2028, while also making allowances for apartments and townhouses.

Such a “housing mix” was included in a 2010 proposal to expand the city’s urban growth boundary, the line beyond which the city is not allowed to develop. That proposal, which called for 65 percent of all new homes within the current and future boundary to be single-family, was rejected by the state and sent back to the city.

According to the Oregon Land Conservation and Development Commission, which reviews UGB proposals, the city failed to justify how such a housing mix would satisfy the need for more affordable options, a need the city itself had argued was driven by a lack of apartments.

The city and LCDC agree Bend needs 16,681 new residences by 2028, but now they must agree on what kinds of residences those will be.

Final say is up to the City Council, but city staff and a committee of volunteers working on the urban growth boundary process have proposed a new mix, cutting the number of new single-family homes down to 55 percent. The remainder is split into 10 percent for what’s called single-family attached housing, which often means townhouses, and 35 percent multifamily, which is commonly apartments.

“Getting to those numbers was a blend of art, science and, to be honest, politics,” said Brian Rankin, the city’s principal planner.

The art, Rankin said, lies in the inherent guesswork of predicting future needs, while the science comes from the way the guessing was informed by models based on a variety of factors. Some of the variables the city examined include past trends, demographic preferences and population projections. However, there is no single way to combine those factors, and the city was able to produce multiple projections for the needed housing mix.

The residential technical advisory committee, a group of volunteers studying the housing mix, initially supported backing a mix that called for 60 percent new single-family homes. That idea, however, encountered the political reality of Oregon’s land use laws.

At a residential committee meeting in late August, a representative of the state’s Department of Land Conservation and Development was asked if he thought the 60 percent or 55 percent option — known respectively as trend one and trend two — had a better chance of being approved by the state.

“Of the two presented, trend two is better,” Rankin recalled the DLCD representative saying.

Andy High, a vice president for the Central Oregon Builders Association and a member of the residential committee, said he believed trend one was the better option, but because of the dire need to expand the urban growth boundary, he backed trend two.

“There’s an extreme land shortage in Central Oregon,” High said last week. “If we don’t do anything, we’re just going to see land prices rise. The reason I supported trend two is because it will likely pass. I think the other way, the 60 percent way, would have better reflected what our community is actually like.”

The two trends

If trend one and trend two were both built out, it would be hard to tell which was which from a bird’s-eye view. If trend one became a reality, by 2028, the city would have 35,633 total single-family homes. With trend two, the number would be 34,799, a gap of 834. Even compared with the original proposal, which called for 65 percent single-family, trend two is only off by 1,668, while the number of multifamily units increases by 333 to 13,223.

Tom Kemper, the executive director of Housing Works, the region’s housing authority, and a member of the residential committee, said he didn’t feel there was enough evidence pointing toward either option.

“It felt like it was just, ‘Do you want door A or door B?’” Kemper said in October. “It’s all a matter of degree between the two, but the interesting thing about it is that it is a substantial departure from the historic trend, which makes a lot of people nervous. I think the speed with which we’re doing this makes me nervous.”

Sid Snyder, a retired software developer on the residential committee, said Friday he believed the city could have gone even further away from single-family homes.

“There’s this one view that we know what people want, because we have the historical data to show what people have bought,” Snyder said. “I don’t agree with that. What people bought can also simply be a reflection of what was available. If you need a roof over your head, you may not like it, but you have to take what’s available.”

Supporting the idea that future development should embrace more apartments and townhouses is the observation that younger generations prefer these housing styles over traditional homes with a fenced-in yard. There’s also the fact that Bend’s rental vacancy rate is less than 1 percent while many of those lucky enough to have an apartment have experienced rising rents.

It has also been argued that the risk of overestimating the need for apartments is less severe than for single-family homes. As Rankin pointed out, “A person who can afford a single-family home can also get an apartment, but the opposite is not always true.”

Nonetheless, Bend residents haven’t always welcomed multifamily developments. A recently proposed apartment complex off Southwest Summer Lake Place has led to residents organizing in opposition, claiming the development will create more traffic and change the feel of the neighborhood . On Northwest Steidl Road, a small street by the Portland Avenue bridge with single-family homes, neighbors fought the building of a triplex for five years, bringing the case to the Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals multiple times.

“We’re not changing this city into a bunch of tenements,” Snyder said. “That’s absurd, but that’s the way many folks have reacted to this. They just see these big, ugly apartment complexes. One, they don’t need to be big, and two, they don’t need to be ugly. They can be perfectly attractive, and they can be duplexes, triplexes, condominiums or townhouses.”

Rankin made the point that in Old Bend, one of the city’s more expensive neighborhoods, multifamily homes exist on streets dominated by large single-family homes.

“We’re not talking about anything new here,” he said. “In the city’s most historic neighborhood, you can see these buildings right across from some of the most valuable single-family homes in the city.”

Rankin pointed to a stretch of Northwest Broadway, where a series of lots have multiple units. And on Northwest Riverside, right across from Drake Park, what looks like a single-family home is actually divided into multiple apartments.

“Density can fit in these neighborhoods without affecting livability, you already see that across the city,” he said.

To help new development shift toward apartments and townhouses, the city is considering changes to its code. The ideas range from creating incentives for such developments with smaller fees to allowing more flexibility in how close a building can come to the sidewalk. The city could also set more strict requirements for density in areas across the city, making it impossible to build large single-family homes in places prime for redevelopment.

“The problem is, it’s up to the developer to actually build something,” Rankin said. “The city has little power to determine how developers work. They interpret demand and risk and the code and profit, and then decide what to do. We can change policies to help the market produce the needed housing, but we really can’t make anything happen. That’s why we need to make sure what we propose is supported by the market.”

Troy Field, the 0.8-acre playing field on NW Bond Street and one of the last pieces of ground left undeveloped in downtown Bend, is officially for sale.

Fratzke Commercial Real Estate listed the parcel, which belongs to Bend-La Pine Schools, at $2.62 million. Although zoned for limited commercial use, it comes overlaid with a public facilities designation, meaning it was meant as a site for some public use. That designation can be removed or incorporated into a future use by a new owner, said Brian Fratzke, whose firm is the school district’s real estate broker.

Eight public entities had the first chance to bid on the property: the city of Bend, Deschutes County, Bend Park & Recreation District, High Desert Education Service District, Deschutes Public Library, Central Oregon Community College, Oregon State University-Cascades and Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.

“We have to give these folks two weeks … and they all came back and said, ‘Thanks, but we don’t want to buy it,’” Fratzke said Wednesday.

The firm priced the field based on comparable sales between 2004 and 2007, Fratzke said. For example, a 0.23-acre parking lot, about 11,000 square feet, at 527 NW Franklin Ave., adjacent to McMenamins Old St. Francis School, sold for $95 a square foot in August 2006, he said. Troy Field, about 35,000 square feet, is priced at about $75 a square foot.

The Bend-La Pine school board agreed in October to designate the lot south of McMenamins Old St. Francis School as surplus property, the first step in listing it for sale. The money from the sale could fund construction of another elementary school, board members have said. Deschutes County assessed the property’s market value at $1.2 million. By comparison, the city earlier this year agreed to sell a 3.2-acre property at Wall Street and Olney Avenue for $1.9 million.

Opponents of the sale urged that the Troy Field property remain a place for lacrosse, soccer and general play. In the past, it’s been a baseball field and, in wintertime from the 1920s to the 1950s, an ice skating rink. Its name derives from the Troy Laundry, which lay east of the field until destroyed by fire sometime after 1989, according to The Bulletin archives.

As property in a limited commercial, or CL, zone, the field may accommodate housing, retail shops and offices, with height restrictions, or open space, such as a park.

The school district fielded calls from several interested parties after its decision to sell the property, said Fratzke, who said he could not identify those callers.

Along with Troy Field, the school district also put up for sale 1.64 acres zoned for medium-density residential use on NE Full Moon Drive across from Ensworth Elementary School. Fratzke Commercial Real Estate lists that property at $285,000.

WASHINGTON — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have set terms for letting borrowers put down as little as 3 percent of a home’s cost to get mortgages, a step criticized by Republican lawmakers as a return to risky lending.

Starting Dec. 13, Fannie Mae will allow the lower down payments for first-time homebuyers and permit refinancing borrowers to reduce equity to 3 percent to cover closing costs, the company said Monday in a statement. Freddie Mac will begin a more limited program in March giving breaks to lower-income buyers and first-time borrowers who get housing counseling.

“These underwriting guidelines provide a responsible approach to improving access to credit while ensuring safe and sound lending practices,” Melvin Watt, who oversees the two U.S.-owned companies as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said in a statement.

Watt encouraged the move as part of a broader effort to spur lending to minorities, young adults and first-time buyers. Lenders have tightened standards after paying tens of billions of dollars to settle lawsuits over mortgage-underwriting flaws.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy more than half of new home loans and package them into bonds, allow down payments as low as 5 percent. Fannie Mae accepted 3 percent down as recently as November 2013 before increasing the requirement in a tightening of its underwriting standards.

The move to allow lower down payments has generated criticism from some Republicans and industry officials. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has faulted the idea as a return to the policies that caused the housing crash.

Officials of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said rules banning risky loan features will ensure that the new low-down payment mortgages are safe. Only borrowers buying or refinancing a single-family primary residence will be eligible.

Editor’s note: The Bulletin has partnered with the University of Oregon’s College of Arts and Sciences and Department of Economics to produce the Central Oregon Business Index. The index provides a regular snapshot of the region’s economy using economic models consistent with national standards. The index, exclusive to The Bulletin, appears quarterly in the Sunday Business section.

In the third quarter of 2014, the Central Oregon Business Index showed continued economic growth so steady that it’s almost boring, said University of Oregon economist Tim Duy, who compiles the data for the index.

“It’s not particularly dramatic,” he said Wednesday. “Drama’s bad. We want consistent, solid, steady improvement, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

The third quarter index reached 125.2, compared to 124.3, a revised figure, in the preceding quarter. The index, which is pegged to a 1998 benchmark of 100, is up 4.3 percent over third-quarter 2013. Duy said he expects to see trends in job growth, home sales, tourism and other measures continue to improve in the coming year.

“The recovery in Central Oregon remains in place,” he wrote in a quarterly analysis. “Expect continued improvement on the back of ongoing growth in the national and state economies.”

Home sales rose to about 440 per month, the highest since the second quarter of 2006, and above the average 259 per month before the 1997-2001 real estate bubble. The continuing arrival of new residents should fuel demand for new housing, particularly single-family homes, Duy said. Talk of another real estate bubble is, so far, misplaced, he added.

“A good chunk of the rebound we’ve seen is a bounce off the bottom. Housing prices fell to a level far too low relative to long-term trends in the region,” Duy said. “What I think is going on right now is we’re still not getting a sufficient supply response” to the demand for new housing.

Elsewhere, tourism showed strong growth as measured by transient room taxes collected in Bend. Duy’s data showed a steady increase, in dollars adjusted for inflation, from $1.7 million in third-quarter 2013 to $2.2 million this year. Only a decline in the number of airline passengers through Redmond Airport darkened the tourism picture, a phenomenon that Duy attributed to the Sept. 1 end of United Express direct service between Portland and Redmond.

The labor market continued to gain strength during the third quarter, with employment up nearly 5 percent over the year, coming within 3,100 jobs of peak employment before the 2007-09 recession, Duy wrote. Employers other than farms added 400 jobs over the quarter.

The loss Tuesday of more than 200 jobs at Woodgrain Millwork, in Prineville, lies outside the trend in Central Oregon, Duy said Wednesday. The company attributed its decision to close a manufacturing line to equipment damaged when a roof collapsed Nov. 14 under the weight of snow.

“Even with a strong economy, there’s still going to be churn,” Duy said. “Just because the economy is improving doesn’t mean everybody’s business is improving equally.”

Overall, he said, the economy gives reason to be optimistic. The U.S. economy is showing strength, and that momentum will be difficult to change.

“Economic activity is gaining strength more broadly,” he said. “Lower unemployment rates nationally and a steady stream of job growth will translate to higher wage growth in the next year.”

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

A second phase of an affordable housing complex on Bend’s east side will provide 40 apartments to low-income people, with four units set aside for veterans and others transitioning out of homelessness, officials said Wednesday.

State and local officials, including Bend Mayor Jim Clinton and Margaret Van Vliet, director of Oregon Housing and Community Services, marked the start of construction of Eastlake Village phase 2 on NE Bellevue Drive.

Kenny LaPoint, executive director of Housing Works, the Central Oregon public housing authority, said R&H Construction may complete the apartments by spring. Oregon Housing and Community Services provided Housing Works with tax credits worth $7.5 million to build the complex.

The new housing will add to the 40 units in phase one and 720 others also managed by Housing Works in Central Oregon, LaPoint said.

The new Eastlake Village complex will feature eight one-bedroom, 16 two-bedroom and 16 three-bedroom apartments, he said. Half the units will be occupied by residents earning 50 percent or less of Deschutes County’s median income; the other half will go to residents earning 60 percent or less of median income, LaPoint said. This year, 50 percent of Deschutes County’s median income equaled $31,200 for a family of four.

Speakers at the event described the lack of affordable housing and dearth of rentals in Bend as a crisis. LaPoint said he believed the city’s rental vacancy rate had slipped below 0.5 percent.

Van Vliet said, “When hardworking families can’t afford a decent apartment, they are forced to stay with friends or pay so much for rent that there’s no money left over for clothing, medication, decent food, much less music lessons or soccer uniforms.”

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