Report Recommends Steps to Speed Up Affordable Housing Development

A report released by the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Nebraska chapter offers a roadmap for increasing affordable housing production in Omaha’s urban core, with recommendations focused on streamlining development, expanding financing options and strengthening partnerships among the public, private and philanthropic sectors.

Omaha’s urban core is generally defined as the area from the Missouri River west to 50th Avenue and from Cuming Street south to Woolworth Avenue.

The report is the result of a Technical Assistance Panel convened in March of 2026 by ULI Nebraska in partnership with the City of Omaha and Front Porch Investments. A multidisciplinary team of experts in housing development, finance, planning and public policy examined barriers to affordable housing and developed recommendations aimed at helping Omaha produce more housing while improving affordability.

According to Jody Holston, executive director of Front Porch Investments, the work didn’t end when the panel concluded.

“The technical assistance panel and the report that followed that, was about coming up with recommendations to help Omaha, and particularly in the urban core, build more affordable housing and improve the processes and tools,” Holston said.

She said Front Porch Investments and the City of Omaha formed an implementation committee even before the report was officially released to begin moving several recommendations forward.

“Now that the final report is out, that group is working to help turn those recommendations into an implementation plan,” Holston said.

Rather than identifying a single solution, Holston said the panel found that addressing housing affordability will require improvements in several areas.

“If the report did anything, it probably highlighted there is no one, single solution,” she said. “There’s no silver bullet to how we fix this.”

Instead, the recommendations fall into three primary categories: improving the development process, strengthening financial tools and enhancing public policies and incentives that support mixed-income neighborhoods.

One of the biggest opportunities identified by the panel involves reducing delays during the development process.

“The barriers we’ve heard most about through this panel and report and the committee work is around delays and processes,” Holston said. “Figuring out ways to streamline those processes so they’re easier to navigate are all ways that we can save time and money that reduce costs being passed down to the end user.”

Rather than pointing to one specific hurdle, Holston said the focus is on improving coordination across the entire development process. She said the panel’s recommendations also call for strengthening financial tools to help both small and large developers access capital, along with policy changes that encourage mixed-income neighborhoods and support additional housing development.

The recommendations build on momentum already underway in Omaha following the city’s historic $40 million affordable housing commitment announced in 2025. Holston said residents can expect additional progress soon.

“Later this month we’ll be putting out an announcement of the first three or four projects that have been funded,” she said. Three projects have already been approved, with another currently under review.

Ultimately, Holston said increasing the overall housing supply is expected to benefit affordability across the market.

“What we hope to do is accelerate how much housing is being built,” she said. “We know that the more we can increase supply, the better that impacts affordability for everybody.”

While many of the recommendations involve behind-the-scenes policy and process improvements, she said the long-term goal is more housing at all price points.

“We are particularly focused on affordable housing, but a lot of these solutions are solutions that more broadly will impact pricing and supply overall,” Holston said.

One of the report’s most encouraging findings, Holston said, is that Omaha is not beginning from scratch.

“We have really committed partners, we have significant investment, we have momentum,” she said. “This report was really about how do we build on that, how do we improve the system so that we can build more housing more efficiently and make stronger neighborhoods.”

Report Recommends Steps to Speed Up Affordable Housing Development

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