Housing For All

A Prairie Progressive Vision for Nebraska's Housing Future

Accessing The (Housing) Stock

A 2024 Legislative Report published by the Housing Committee of the Nebraska Unicameral painted a clear picture of the looming housing crisis in Nebraska – echoing realizations we’d been made well aware of in Lincoln through lived experiences of our neighbors struggling to maintain stable housing and our own City housing study in 2022. A wave has hit Nebraska, noting the beginning of our submersion in the rising tide of housing costs. A tide which has put low-moderate income communities in coastal states underwater for the best part of the last decade, aren’t something we can ignore. However, despite the great advantages of foresight, Nebraska has done little to pass meaningful legislation or establish systems that produce the most critically needed housing beyond a series of property tax cuts – whose primary purpose and outcomes are little more than continued austerity for the sake of wealthy elites in the state. We face a reality of a political leadership in Nebraska which at a local level may be unwilling to soberly confront that developer incentives alone won’t solve the crisis, fearing political backlash, and at the state-level which is dogmatically dismantling our few tools at hand to spur attainable, let alone affordable, housing options in a shameless weaponization of executive powers as means of class warfare.

Challenges in Nebraska housing, because of both institutional weakness of the State and limited leverage to steer financial markets on account of our size, are not going to be solved by a “silver bullet” – be they tax cuts, homestead exemptions, or public private partnership. Rural communities, facing an aging and shrinking population, see most new housing developments by the market as unattainable and, when they do materialize, starkly mismatched with the area median incomes and existing home prices in their communities. Our urban centers face core neighborhoods contending with decades of disinvestment, predatory and speculative land-lording, and an overwhelming system of financialization of housing which divorces housing true purpose as shelter, and the foundation of strong neighborhoods, from the drives of commercialization which polarizes the market for new construction into soulless “5 over 1” “luxury” projects and ever larger and expensive single-family detached housing that like the aforementioned developments in rural communities rarely is created with a cities own market conditions in mind. Housing has become a financial tool re-designed to produce mortgages and other debt-derived incomes for the financial system, not shelter, and we as Nebraska’s need look no further than front-range cities like Denver to see what our consequences will be, unless we choose to take another course.

Those most affected by the squeeze of the housing market have already started to build a future that works for them. The Capital City started this year in the midst of a fight to end discrimination by source of income (SOI), a fight which the progressive coalition of renters, housing advocates, and civic non-profits like Appleseed and Civic Nebraska won. Pending threats at State-level legislation to claw back renter’s rights loom in the distance, but if democracy is to serve as evidence of the people’s will, then the people have spoken pretty consistently with other ballot initiatives untethered to the partisan fray. More Lincolnites showed up to vote for the end of SOI-based discrimination than any individual candidate for city council, which, mind you, were all at-large in the last municipal cycle. The energy to take bold steps is here, and, arguably, Nebraskan and, specifically Lincoln voters, are more willing to come out and fight for ideas and policy to address housing insecurity and unaffordability than they are to put faith in party platforms and candidates. Liberal candidates and the NPD lack a story, or the courage to publicly share their vision, for a future Nebraska which ensures housing for all.

The evidence is clear, both in terms of the inevitabilities of Nebraska’s current trajectory, and that when written in plain English, detached from the “R”s and “D”s of the national pissing match, Nebraskans are not only willing to, but starving to vote for progressive reforms and systems. One needn’t even look back to the Populist Era, but just 2005 that state-wide measures to protect working families can and do win at the ballot box. Restricting land ownership to people, and not allowing corporate ownership of land was nearly implemented for agricultural cases. While this tool could have had useful implementations for housing, giving a precedent for limiting housing acquisitions to vulnerable communities, be they rural or urban, to individual homeowners who actually own their home for the use value as shelter. Unfortunately, however, the Supreme Court struck down the amendment to the Nebraska constitution. Meaning, for the purposes of combating corporate acquisition of homes for profit, dispossessing our communities of their “naturally occurring” affordable housing stock, we can’t rewrite the rules of the market to provide avenues of preserving attainable housing stock (just as we can’t agricultural land for aspiring, local food producers). We have to dream bigger – we have to envision systems in Lincoln and state-wide which intentionally ensure housing is accessible to working Nebraskans through re-“commoning” land and housing. We have to stop the bleeding by rolling up our sleeves – subverting or removing land from the market.

We Need a Relationship to Housing that Serves All

If we’re going to have a conversation about housing, we have to start from the common understanding that housing is both a human right, not a privilege, and something that must be guaranteed by a community, not something “earned” through hard work. Housing is also more than just an abstract concept, a quantifiable inventory to track. Housing is home, and I don’t say that to be poetic. It’s the sanctuary, the hearth, the base for individuals and families of all kinds to gather in. In America, we’ve conflated the value of “home” with that of homes, housing, residential property. First and foremost, housing should be a shelter. Ideally, it should be created with the intended goal of providing shelter. Life, most of our most precious moments, as Chuck Marohn opens his Escaping the Housing Trap, happen in our homes. If we are to build a future in which the Good Life is not just obtainable, but actively cultivated for all, we have to start with ensuring everyone has a place to call home.

Housing first shelters have been talked to death by other writers, including the inspiration series for these Prairie Non-Negotiables, so I won’t spend too much time justifying their role in immediately alleviating the suffering of those priced out of housing. However, if you’re skeptical of its merits, beyond the foundational respect it gives for human dignity, do read into the model. However, grounding ourselves in a shared prioritization of getting folks off of the street, the inherent by-product of enclosure and private property, we’ll have to maintain systems to combat as long as we live in a world with a housing market. We must also work to reshape how we build housing systems in the state. Fortunately, we already have tools at hand that, through public investment, we can scale to provide home to all.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs), in the face of America’s political rejection of public housing, are amongst the fastest growing and intrinsically sustainable tools available to implement and maintain affordable housing options. Other Midwestern states, perhaps most notably modeled in Minnesota but also Wisconsin, Iowa, and already in the Capital City, leverage the shrinking pool of federal housing dollars and varying state and municipal dollars to create housing inventory, homes for working people, isolated from the speculation of the market. Municipal partnerships, while a more recent adaptation of the CLT movement – whose roots are in agricultural and black organizing, able to trace lineage to maroon communities’ tradition of re-establishing commons for both housing and open-field agriculture. State housing funds should be prioritized in the short term, and exclusive in the long term for non-profit, shared-equity housing projects which will ensure homeownership projects serve more than a single family in their lifetime and that rental and other multi-family projects preserve their affordability for the long haul, beyond the 40 year timeline which projects constructed after the dismantling of public housing in the 80s are now reaching. Limited-equity co-operatives can be both assembled with state support, or emerge from tenant organizing when empowered with policies like first right of refusal for tenants, sometimes called “tenants opportunity to purchase act”, when properties change hands through either prospective private sale or city acquisition when code violations build up liens on a property. Existing, emergent tenants unions like the Lincoln Tenants Union or their counterparts in Omaha are equipped to organize and educate tenants of options emergent through legislation at the state or local level, meaning that financing options either through public trust funds or municipally supported products at local banks or (ideally) credit unions.

That all said, of course, there is no way out of the housing crisis that doesn’t include construction of new housing. The state’s population will likely continue to shift eastward to Lincoln and Omaha, as it has been since the 1980s, meaning that we simply do not have enough housing stock to ensure everyone in Nebraska has a home where economic realities are displacing them towards. An intentional and transparent shift in development regulations – from fire code to zoning – needs to happen to “thicken up” existing neighborhoods and ensure that new housing products are available, affordable, and sustainable for Lincoln and other growing communities in Nebraska to provide. We need to ensure that we don’t simply strip back protections as loudly demanded by YIMMBYs and the “abundance” crowd of liberal commentators.

Finding Our Way Home

Foremost, the State of Nebraska must stop raiding, reallocating, and shuffling our two affordable housing trust funds. Assuming we can stop the bleeding there, as noted at the top of this piece, Lincoln alone still needs THOUSANDS of affordable housing units, of physical types and ownership structures, integrated into our existing urban fabric that also facilitate an affordable lifestyle that allows for continued reinvestment in our public transportation and alternative means of commuting to work that aren’t reliant on increasing unaffordable and unsustainable personal vehicles. Likewise, new neighborhoods, in-fill in existing neighborhoods, and redevelopments of former industrial or office districts need to contend with an aging population and changing family make-ups which make the standard, ranch-style, 2-3 bedroom single-family suburb both a relict of a past era and more immediately ill-fitting to the needs of Nebraskan families.

Proponents of the “YIMMBY” movement in California, often championed by online “Urbanists” and now substantiated in liberal political discourse by works like Ezra Klein’s Abundance have and do often prescribe sweeping de-regulation as the essential pathway to bring about diversification and rapid supply in the housing market. At risk of starting a reading list out of this series, while imperfect, Escaping the Housing Trap by Charles Marohn and Daniel Herriges of Strong Towns provides a much better framework for accelerating local housing supply, while recognizing the ways that the New Deal Era’s sweeping reforms and post-war boom’s homogenization of suburban development both directly contributed to our current, seemingly inescapable, housing market’s boom-bust cycle of collapse and unaffordability. To summarize, and save you the read, we need to elect candidates to public office and unify locally around incremental options for increases in housing and neighborhood that are accessible to individuals and non-profits: permitting accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in all residential zones (granny flats), adding a clause for “next density by right” on owner-occupied lots, and (not outlined in Marohn’s book) legalizing “single room occupancy” apartment. These options for creating homes where none or few currently exist, will necessitate an expansion of share-equity models, allowing for individual households to pool funds, and locally pre-approved plans for new housing solutions like ADUs. Local financial institutions, likely with public support to reduce risk, need to provide financial “products” (loans, namely) for these smaller projects whose debt can’t be bundled and sold into a national mortgage or development loan market – one of the current structural drivers of the bipolar development pattern of sprawling single-family suburbs and rapid, sudden intensified redevelopment of historically urban areas into generic “5 over 1” apartments. De-regulation at a State or local level, without procedures of accountability and community control, and without financial tools and public effort to ease navigation of city hall for prospective, non-professional developers, would recreate the conditions of community erasure and replacement that necessitated the resistance of urban and working class communities that spawned the “NIMBY” and YIMMBY debate of today.

Neighborhoods are living, breathing ecosystems, and their surrounding contexts and the needs of those who call them home are never fixed. Recognizing the causes of the “NIMBY” organizers who, to their credit, did stop numerous environmental and community devastations in the mid–20th century to today, we must strive for a balance of local control in housing development and adaptability of land-use to meet rising needs for housing diversity, affordability, and sustainability of the local housing ecosystem. In place of land assembly, and redevelopment as the default process of affordable housing construction, we should instead fill in core, historic neighborhoods of Eastern Nebraska cities like Lincoln and provide new standards of land-ownership and development, as Community Land Trusts provide, for and equitable and balanced growth in the urban footprint that stewards adjacent agricultural and natural ecosystems and conserves from unnecessary, and financially unsustainable urbanization.