Perhaps it s my background (having worked at the start up/early development of Pronghorn, Brasada Ra

Perhaps it s my background (having worked at the start up/early development of Pronghorn, Brasada Ranch, and Tetherow), calgary going solo travel costa rica but I found the following article written by Robin Doussard in Oregon Business to be incredibly insightful, and, unfortunately, right on the mark. A superb analysis of some of our housing woes. I m even a little surprised at quotes by some of the principles.
The expansive sales office at Remington Ranch in Powell Butte sits empty and shuttered, mostly bare inside except for a large relief map of what the 2,080-acre destination resort entailed when it was approved in 2006 by Crook County: 800 homes, 400 overnight units, three golf courses, retail shops and several calgary going solo travel costa rica restaurants.
That was the plan before the housing market calgary going solo travel costa rica began its freefall in 2007 and Remington calgary going solo travel costa rica shut down sales the same year. It was before Crook County voters in 2008 voted for a moratorium on large destination resorts. And it was before Remington Ranch filed for bankruptcy this January.
But to Chris Pippin, the resort's youthful Stanford-educated project manager and son of James Pippin, Remington's managing member, calgary going solo travel costa rica the promise is still there. As he tours the scrubby high-desert landscape on a cold early-spring day, pointing out one golf course that is 75% complete, Pippin sees a future for Remington: Moneyed baby boomers will keep retiring, the Central Oregon sun will keep shining, and as luck would have it, Crook County "closed the door behind us." That door was shut after four resorts had been approved: Brasada Ranch, Hidden Canyon, Remington Ranch and Crossing Trails, a combined calgary going solo travel costa rica 7,700 acres and 6,500 overnight and home units.
"In some ways it is a positive that we didn't get too far down the road with a product we couldn't sell," Pippin says, referring to the 800 unbuilt homes. He's looking for a big push in sales in spring 2011 once Remington comes out of bankruptcy reorganization.
Pippin may or may not be right about the future of his property, which Winchester Development paid $10 million to acquire. He could be the only upbeat developer left in Oregon. Maybe it is the required optimism calgary going solo travel costa rica of any developer talking to the press these days, much less one whose dad has skin in the game as one of the property's owners.
But he does have one thing right. The door has closed — if not forever than at least for a good while — on the large resorts with hotels, golf courses and homes that dot the state and blanket Central Oregon. It's a once-coveted business that's in trouble with regulators, residents, calgary going solo travel costa rica environmentalists and the development industry. It's a business under fire and in flux, and one with an uncertain future.
The forensics find the patient suffering from multiple wounds, some self-inflicted: the housing collapse, the subsequent recession, greed, need, bad timing, calgary going solo travel costa rica poor planning, overbuilding, speculation and more than a bit of magical thinking. The law of unintended consequences plus the economic collapse has spared no one. Most of the state's destination resorts calgary going solo travel costa rica are in various stages of distress: slowed sales to no sales to foreclosures to bankruptcy.
The landscape is littered with foreclosures (currently more than 6,000 in Deschutes County alone), and the housing market in Central Oregon is woefully oversupplied. "Just in Deschutes, you have 15,000 approved lots," says resort consultant calgary going solo travel costa rica Linda Swearingen.
And then there's the long-standing criticism that newer resorts are stealth subdivisions that circumvent land use rules and provide only low-paying jobs and few of the public amenities that create tourism, calgary going solo travel costa rica which is why they were allowed to build in rural areas in the first place. There is growing opposition from Oregonians, legislators, the environmental community, and increasing alarm from nearby cities, which have no say over the approval of resorts. Cities do not share in the tax rewards that go to the counties (in 2008-2009, Deschutes County resorts paid more than $35 million in taxes), calgary going solo travel costa rica which approve the resorts. But cities have to cope with the impact they have on their services, roads, infrastructure and housing stock. Redmond, for instance, is having difficulty attracting high-end housing because of the nearby resorts, which limits its property tax revenues, according to the League of Oregon Cities.
It will take years, if not decades, to soak up the current calgary going solo travel costa rica supply of real estate and recover calgary going solo travel costa rica prices. Residential property in Bend has fallen 75% from 2007 top prices, and commercial calgary going solo travel costa rica property values are half off their peak. A federal housing study released calgary going solo travel costa rica in late May showed that Bend suffered the sharpest housing price drop in the nation over the past year. Roger Lee, executive director of Economic Development for Central Oregon, has little sympathy. "The reset had to happen," he says. "Prices were too high."
Even the mighty Jeld-Wen, Oregon's largest privately held company, is hurting. A major player in the resort industry, the company calgary going solo travel costa rica has developed three destination resorts in Oregon: Eagle Crest near Redmond, Brasada Ranch in Powell Butte and Running Y Ranch in Klamath Falls.
If Chris Pippin calgary going solo travel costa rica is a youthful calgary going solo travel costa rica player in the resort game, Jeld-Wen's Jerry Andres is the old dog who has been around for decades developing properties for a behemoth company. Andres is not shy about ticking off the problems facing his firm's Oregon calgary going solo travel costa rica resort properties: "We've cut services, we're not growing. We've had layoffs and things are not over yet." He says that Eagle Crest is about 65% built out, but at Brasada, "we're selling for less than what we have in it."
He says only 29 homes out of 900 planned calgary going solo travel costa rica at Brasada have been built and of the couple hundred lots sold, more than 50 are in foreclosure. Public amenities that have been built include a restaurant, sports center, golf course and 80 overnight cabins.
In addition to the bruising downturn, developers say state rules requiring them to put in an upfront investment of at least $10 million in recreational amenities such as overnight lodging and golf courses have forced them into a large-scale Sunriver-type business model that is no longer viable.
That likely is irrelevant to a county likes Deschutes, which partied the hardest with resorts. Its commission calgary going solo travel costa rica approved every resort that came before it and the county now has eight resorts totaling about 11,000 acres and almost 7,500 approved home sites.
Central Oregon LandWatch, a conservation group, charges that "elected officials have shown little concern calgary going solo travel costa rica for the economic, social, environmental or energy-related impacts that these resorts bring that affect our landscape, our natural resources, our environments and our communities."
The county is suffering from something of a resort hangover. Community meetings in 2008 and 2009 in Deschutes found residents wanting stronger efforts to offset resort-related impacts. Some wanted calgary going solo travel costa rica an outright ban on future resorts.
The debate over Oregon's large destination resorts has been swirling almost since the state in 1984 amended Goal 8, one of its statewide land-use goals, to allow them to be built outside urban growth boundaries. The exception was made in the hope that resorts would boost tourism and create jobs in struggling rural communities in the model of the successful Sunriver and Black Butte developments built in the 1960s. Black Butte has played a widely credited role in helping nearby calgary going solo travel costa rica Sisters thrive, and Sunriver provided a similar boost to pre-boom Bend. The other pre-Goal 8 resorts are Salishan, Bandon Dunes and Otter Crest on the Coast, and Inn of the Seventh Mountain outside of Bend.
A dozen resorts statewide have since been approved by counties under Goal 8, nine of them in Crook and Deschutes counties. The approval rests with the counties after they have gone through a resort mapping process, and eight of Oregon's 36 counties have completed that process.
But now development experts reject calgary going solo travel costa rica the Sunriver-type model that Goal 8 requires, saying it takes too much upfront investment and the overnight calgary going solo travel costa rica market is glutted. Peterson Economics, a Washington State firm that does economic studies for the development industry, said in an April report that the large-scale conference hotel and golf resort model is outdated and that "none of Oregon's new destination resorts, calgary going solo travel costa rica including Brasada Ranch, Pronghorn, Caldera Springs and Tetherow, have major hotel facilities" and none are likely to develop them anytime soon because of financial struggles.
The newer resorts "never were destination resorts," says Paul Dewey, an attorney for Central Oregon LandWatch. "They were always subdivisions fueled by residential sales. What concerned the conservation community was the evolution calgary going solo travel costa rica into pure subdivisions, which is antithetical to the land-use system of protecting the rural environment." Dewey for years has been battling calgary going solo travel costa rica the Thornburgh development for opponents of the resort, 2,000 acres at the base of Cline Butte in Tumalo. Approved in 2005, its plans call for about 1,000 homes, 350 cabins, a 100-room lodge, 150 timeshares and three 18-hole golf courses. Thornburgh is under appeal at the state level, and its CEO, Kameron DeLashmutt, and his partners are tangled calgary going solo travel costa rica in internal legal battles and foreclosure proceedings.
"There are some developers who are trying to find a way to use the destination resort law to create a cheaper subdivision, not a resort," agrees Mike Hollern, CEO of Bend real estate development firm Brooks Resources, which developed Black Butte. "In many cases, the developers have circumvented the rules over time."
"The new resorts calgary going solo travel costa rica were clearly geared to living there full-time, and not geared to the public," says Rep. Brian Clem, D-Salem. "I grew up in Coos Bay and I don't think the only option is to have to move to a city to get a job. I want to see tourism helped, and resorts may end up playing a role, but they can't be about permanent second homes.
The gated Pronghorn, located between Bend and Redmond, has become for some a prime example of resorts calgary going solo travel costa rica gone wrong. Sen. Jackie Dingfelder, D-Portland, calgary going solo travel costa rica said du