The field north of Alpenglow Park is still empty. It has been since the park opened, thirty-seven acres of sprayground, bouldering wall and off-leash dog runs bordered on its north edge by sagebrush and juniper that nobody has done anything with. If you've crossed the footbridge from Hidden Hills into the park more than a few times, you've looked at that field and wondered, at some point, when someone would finally do something with it.
Paperwork now exists that answers that question. And one line in that paperwork matters more than the housing count everyone will talk about first.
What's Actually Sitting on Those 45 Acres
The parcel is 45 acres at the corner of 15th Street and Murphy Road, owned by JL Ward, the same longtime Bend development company that sold the land under Alpenglow Park itself to Bend Park and Recreation District back in 2014. Pahlisch Homes filed a planning application for it on September 4, 2025, under the name the Union Master Plan. The filing lays out 164 single-family homes, 64 townhomes and 138 multifamily units, close to five acres of open space, and roughly two acres of mixed-use commercial land clustered near the existing roundabout at 15th and Murphy, the one that's been there for years, not the one under construction a mile north.
That distinction matters, because it's easy to hear "roundabout" and "15th Street" and assume every orange barrel on that road belongs to the same project. It doesn't. More on that below.
None of the 366 units in the Union plan have broken ground. As of the most recent public reporting, the application still needed a hearing before the planning commission and final sign-off from city council before Pahlisch could move to a detailed site plan. The Bend Bulletin's coverage from last September is the clearest public record of what's been proposed, and it's worth reading if you want the source rather than a secondhand summary.
The Part of the Plan That Isn't About Houses
Buried in the same planning narrative is a sentence about infrastructure that has nothing to do with square footage. The application describes widening the existing bike path along the parcel and building a new trail into Alpenglow Park through an undercrossing on Murphy Road.
Right now there is exactly one way to walk or bike from Hidden Hills into Alpenglow Park: the elevated footbridge over the BNSF railroad tracks, built as part of the park's original construction and finished after the rest of the park because of the added engineering the crossing required. Every dog walk, every after-school bike ride to the sprayground, every trip to the bouldering wall from the Hidden Hills side goes over that one bridge. It has worked because it's the only option, not because it's especially convenient depending on which end of the neighborhood you live in.
An undercrossing on Murphy Road would be a second one. Not a sidewalk widening, not a repaved shoulder, but a separate grade-separated crossing that gives the park a second front door. If it's built as described in the filing, it wouldn't just serve the 366 new households moving into the Union development. It would shorten the walk for anyone in Hidden Hills whose house sits closer to Murphy Road than to the existing footbridge, and it would mean the park is no longer designed around a single point of entry from the neighborhood.
That's the actual news buried in a filing that reads, at first pass, like just another housing count.
Here's how the Union parcel compares to the other large project reshaping this same stretch of Murphy Road, JL Ward's own subdivision a mile to the west, near the Bend Golf Club:
| Union Master Plan | JL Ward's Murphy Road subdivision | |
|---|---|---|
| Applicant | Pahlisch Homes | JL Ward |
| Location | 45 acres at 15th Street and Murphy Road, directly north of Alpenglow Park | South of Murphy Road, near Bend Golf Club |
| Housing mix | 164 single-family, 64 townhomes, 138 multifamily (366 total) | More than 700 units |
| Commercial component | Roughly 2 acres of mixed-use land near the 15th/Murphy roundabout | Not specified in available filings |
| New park trail connection | Undercrossing on Murphy Road into Alpenglow Park | Not specified |
| Status as of last public filing | Application filed September 2025, awaiting planning commission and council approval | Under construction as of last reporting |
Two large developments, same road, same general timeline, only one of them explicitly promising a second way into the neighborhood's own park.
The Roundabout at 15th and Ferguson Is Almost Done
If your commute this summer felt like a longer version of itself, that's not the Union project. It's the roundabout the city built at 15th Street and Ferguson Road, about a mile north on the same corridor near Reed Market. The intersection closed completely on June 22, 2026, part of the 2020 Transportation GO Bond's work on the Reed Market corridor, timed to overlap with summer break so school traffic wouldn't compound the detour.
The city's target was to reopen by September 3, ahead of the school year. A Bend Bulletin report from September 10 put paving and striping still underway, with the project running a couple of weeks past that target rather than hitting it clean. Close, but not quite the clean handoff the city had planned.
A resident who's lived off Ferguson Road for 41 years, Terese Dinges, told Central Oregon Daily before construction began that she'd watched drivers take risks at that intersection for years, "I hope it eases people's stress with traffic and moves people quickly." City project engineer Christian Williams said the intersection had been flagged in both the transportation system plan and the southeast area plan as one that needed enhancing, in part because of the left turns drivers make there heading south toward Caldera High School, the same school this corridor feeds into further down 15th Street.
It's not the last roundabout work coming to this stretch. The city is also planning to convert the existing roundabout at 15th and Reed Market into a full double-lane configuration, with construction potentially starting next spring, and a future roundabout at Ferguson and 27th tied to the pace of development at Stevens Ranch further east. The corridor isn't settling down. It's mid-project, with more mid-project stretches ahead of it.
What Isn't Changing at Alpenglow This Fall
None of this touches the park itself. Bend Park and Recreation District's fall 2026 registration opened August 4, and Art Station classes open for the season with open houses running each month through winter starting October 11, the same programs the park has run every year regardless of what's happening on the parcel next door.
The dog park's agility course, the seesaw, A-frame, tunnel and weave poles that made it the first of its kind in a BPRD facility, is unaffected. So is Zenith, the 18-to-20-foot cor-ten steel sculpture installed in the park in August 2022 after more than 1,400 residents weighed in on its design. It's still the only piece of public art at Alpenglow, and it's still standing exactly where it was, out past the sprayground, catching the same high desert light it always has.
If the Union Master Plan clears its remaining approvals as filed, the next few years change how Hidden Hills reaches its own park, not just what the neighborhood sees when it looks north from the footbridge. Until then, the field is still a field with paperwork attached, and the bridge is still the only way across.
If you want to know what happens next on that parcel, or anywhere else in this part of southeast Bend, that's the kind of update Bend Living tracks as a matter of course, not just when there's a listing attached to it. Schedule a consultation with David Holland if you'd like it added to your radar.
