On affordable housing in Lincoln and where the mayor’s focus on climate change took her

Jake Hoppe, an affordable housing developer, promoted a new model his company is working on in Lincoln and two other Nebraska communities during a speech to the Downtown Rotary Club last week.

He elaborated on the one we’ve written about: Foxtail Meadows in southwest Lincoln on more than 40 acres of land.

The idea, he said, is to develop a neighborhood with a variety of housing types, moving affordable housing out of high-poverty areas where it tends to be concentrated. While there are advantages to redeveloping core areas of the city, there are also downsides.

Many of those high-poverty areas, for example, aren’t supportive of families and data shows they don’t have the best outcomes for children, he told the group.

The development underway near South Folsom Street and West Pioneers Boulevard will ultimately have more than 600 apartments, row houses and single-family homes and will be a mix of affordable and market-rate units, as well as some single-family homes targeted to workforce housing (those making close to the area’s median income, which was $101,600 for a family of four last year).

Hoppe Development, which builds about 5% of the state’s affordable units each year, has similar projects in Grand Island, Fremont, Papillion and Lexington.

“We put out a first-rate amenity package that everyone gets to share in,” Hoppe said.

It also means they own everything, so, for instance, when the Hoppes found out about a program for refugee housing they were able to partner with a nonprofit and add six units of refugee housing. They’re doing the same thing in Lexington and Grand Island.

One of the challenges to building new neighborhoods is offering easy access to needed services like public transportation and child care. For the latter, Hoppe said, they’re exploring ways to entice child care workers to the area by offering down payment assistance for in-home child care providers.

They’ve also taken advantage of the growing number of nursing homes closing in rural communities. Hoppe Development bought three recently closed nursing homes in Milford, West Point and Fremont and turned them into affordable apartments, he said.

With the one in Milford, he said, they learned renovation costs were low enough they could create apartments without the restrictions that come with the federal income-tax credits and still offer them at a low cost.

I figured Hoppe would discuss a recent controversy involving how the Lancaster County Assessor determined values for Section 42 housing — projects subsidized with federal low-income tax credits — that resulted in skyrocketing values and brought the constitutionality of the state law that guides such valuations into question.

Hoppe didn’t address the issue, but he did make clear the need for subsidies, saying the old model of “trickle-down housing” — new houses or apartments whose value decreases over time and become available to people who make less money — is not creating sufficient affordable housing to meet communities’ needs.

Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird and Kim Morrow, the city’s chief sustainability officer, recently attended a United Nations climate change conference in Dubai.

Climate action is one of the mayor’s top priorities. She created a Climate Action Plan for the city during her first term and is chairwoman of the U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s local government advisory committee.

She and Morrow were among 85,000 participants attending the international conference and among a contingent of about 20 mayors from around the country invited for the first time — an acknowledgment by climate leaders that 70% of global emissions come from cities, Morrow said.

There’s a growing recognition that action at the local level is necessary for nations to meet the 2015 Paris Climate Accord goals, she said.

They were invited by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the conference president to attend the conference’s Local Climate Action Summit. The mayor got the invitation, Morrow said, because the city is part of a bipartisan Climate Mayors group.

Bloomberg Philanthropies covered all costs associated with the trip, Morrow said.

Gaylor Baird participated in the Local Climate Summit, a mayor’s innovation studio and dozens of sessions on ways local governments can find innovative climate change solutions, Morrow said.

Attending the conference made the city eligible for a new grant program through Bloomberg Philanthropies to engage young people in climate solutions.

It also gave them a chance to network and learn of programs and grants that could benefit Lincoln. Morrow said they met numerous federal officials, strengthened relationships with organizations doing climate work and shared ideas with other mayors.

“We are using this knowledge to inform our thinking about next steps for us here in Lincoln,” Morrow said.

Speaking of the mayor’s focus on climate change, the city is holding two town hall meetings and asking residents to fill out an online survey on ways the city can reduce greenhouse gasses.

The Climate Action Plan set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050.

Feedback from the survey and meetings will be used to create yet another plan, this one called a Priority Climate Action Plan. It will identify actions and policies the city could implement in the near future and it will qualify the city for federal funding.

Morrow said they’re looking at a range of ideas at the town hall meetings and the survey will help to prioritize.

The meetings will touch on a variety of energy, waste and biogas capture ideas — everything from using high-energy heat pumps and solar power, to installing more EV chargers, creating more bike lanes, collecting food waste for composting and planting more trees.

The Nebraska Department of Energy and Environment is co-hosting the in-person town hall meeting and the city got a grant from the state for the new plan.

A virtual town hall meeting will be Feb. 5 at 7 p.m. To register, contact Morrow at kcmorrow@lincoln.ne.gov. The in-person town hall will be Feb. 8 from 6 p.m.-8 p.m. at Park Middle School, 855 S. Eighth St.

The online survey is open until Feb. 18 at lincoln.ne.gov/Resilient.