Nebraska’s Housing Progress Is Now Public

Here’s What the Updated Dashboard Shows.

Nebraska has a housing problem. That is not a new observation. What is new is the ability to track it in real time, with data that updates automatically as new information becomes available at the state and national level.

The Nebraska Strategic Housing Council’s progress dashboard recently received a significant update, going live in late April with refreshed American Community Survey data, updated Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, and new indicators developed with each of the Council’s four Strategic Pillars to better reflect the actual work being done across the state. The dashboard now updates automatically as new ACS, Census, and BLS data is released, so the picture it shows stays current without requiring manual rebuilds.

The Framework Behind the Dashboard

Nebraska’s 2022 Strategic Housing Framework was developed by the Nebraska Strategic Housing Council with support from NIFA, the Nebraska Department of Economic Development, Wellstone Collaborative Strategies, and Queen City Development. It was built around a clear vision: that all Nebraskans have safe, affordable, quality housing choices to rent or own, and that housing is a driver of community well-being and economic opportunity.

The Council identified two Shared Priorities to pursue over a five-year period.

Shared Priority 1: By 2028, 80 percent of Nebraska households are not housing cost-burdened.

Shared Priority 2: By 2028, develop and rehabilitate 35,000 affordable and attainable low- to middle-income rental and ownership housing units across Nebraska. This includes rehabilitating or infilling 3,000 unsafe properties and providing 10,000 units, with any necessary supports, for households making under $20,000.

The dashboard is the public tracking tool for those targets. Its job is not to tell a comfortable story, but to show where Nebraska is, what is being done about it, and where the gaps remain.

All Framework documents, including the full 2022 Strategic Housing Framework and the 2025 Nebraska Housing Needs Assessment: Informing Policy, Measuring Impact, are available at nifa.org/housing-framework.

What Got Updated and Why It Matters

The April update did two things. First, it brought the underlying data current with the latest American Community Survey release and refreshed employment and wage figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Going forward, the dashboard will continue updating automatically as new data from those sources is released. Second, and more substantively, NIFA worked with each of the four Strategic Pillars to identify data points that better demonstrate the specific impacts and efforts each Pillar is driving. The result is a dashboard that is more directly connected to the Framework’s actual work on the ground.

What the Dashboard Shows: A Pillar-by-Pillar Overview

Pillar One: Financial Support and Incentives for Development

This pillar focuses on the financial tools available for creating affordable housing, including Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), Nebraska’s state-level Affordable Housing Tax Credits (AHTC), Rural Workforce Housing grants, and the Middle Income Workforce Housing Fund.

The dashboard tracks tax credit allocations over time, showing both units supported and dollars awarded under the 9% and 4% LIHTC programs. In 2026, the 4% program supported 1,468 units, the highest single-year total in the tracked period. Workforce housing fund allocations are shown by year for both rural and urban programs, giving a longitudinal view of how competitive grant funding has moved across the state.

Pillar Two: Education and Policy

Pillar Two focuses on helping communities eliminate barriers to diversified housing. The dashboard tracks distribution of the Nebraska Housing Toolkit, educational presentations delivered across the state, and activity under the Communities for Housing initiative.

Since September 2025, NIFA staff and Pillar Two members have presented at eight events about the Strategic Housing Framework and Toolkit. Toolkit downloads are mapped by county, showing where communities are engaging with the resource.

The dashboard also tracks Communities for Housing, known as C4H, which NIFA launched in 2025 to provide peer networking, technical assistance, and flexible funding for community-identified housing needs. The first C4H cohort, selected in late 2025, includes:

1. City of Bridgeport
2. Economic Development Council of Buffalo County
3. City of Plattsmouth
4. Seward County Housing Corporation
5. Southwest Nebraska Community Betterment Corporation
6. City of Superior

Communities interested in hosting a Strategic Housing Framework presentation can contact NIFA’s Community Collaboration Team at nifa.org/community-collaboration.

Pillar Three: Safety Net and Special Populations

This pillar focuses on housing access for Nebraskans with lower or fixed incomes and for special populations. The data here is direct.

Nearly 14% of Nebraska households, roughly 110,465, earn less than $25,000 annually. At that income level, a household can afford a monthly rent of approximately $429 including average utilities. There are currently fewer than 18,000 housing units in Nebraska with monthly rents under $499. The dashboard puts the shortage of affordable and available units for this income group at approximately 92,500.

Nearly 42% of renter-occupied households spend more than 30% of their income on housing, the federal threshold for cost-burdened status. The Pillar Three section tracks household income distribution, rental costs, overcrowding, and unsheltered population data to give a full picture of housing instability across the state.

Pillar Four: Workforce and Community Capacity

No amount of funding or policy change closes Nebraska’s housing gap without the workers to build and maintain homes. Pillar Four tracks the construction workforce: employment levels, wages, construction establishments by geography, and the pipeline of students enrolled in Skilled and Technical Sciences programs.

Nebraska’s construction employment grew from approximately 52,300 workers in 2018 to more than 62,000 in 2024, and average annual wages climbed from roughly $51,600 to over $70,000 in the same period. But the picture is uneven. Rural counties, particularly those at the higher end of the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes scale, are seeing construction establishments decline even as the number of households per construction worker rises. Rural communities are trying to build more housing with a thinner workforce, and the dashboard makes that gap visible at the county level.

Why a Living Dashboard Changes the Conversation

Housing challenges in Nebraska are not uniform. A rural community losing construction workers has different needs than a neighborhood where 40% of renters are cost-burdened. A dashboard that stays current as new data is released, and that reflects the specific efforts of each Strategic Pillar, gives communities, developers, policymakers, and advocates a shared, reliable starting point for those conversations.

The Strategic Housing Council and NIFA are committed to keeping the dashboard current. It is not a one-time snapshot of where Nebraska stood in 2022. It is an ongoing accountability tool for a five-year effort with real milestones and a 2028 deadline.

Explore the Dashboard

The full Nebraska Strategic Housing Council dashboard is available at dashboards.mysidewalk.com/nshc-dashboard.

Framework documents and additional resources are at nifa.org/housing-framework.

Related Reading

• Nebraska’s Strategic Housing Framework: Full Framework documents, the 2025 Housing Needs Assessment, and background on the Council’s work.
• NIFA Community Collaboration Programs and Support: Information on C4H and other community-facing initiatives.
• NIFA Data and Research: NIFA’s Profile of Nebraska dashboard, program data, and recent housing research.

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