Listen To This Story
Members of Nebraska's housing industry say they welcome the changes brought by a major federal housing law that took effect July 10 — but all share cautious optimism about what it can actually do for the industry in the state.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed overwhelmingly in both houses of Congress and was sent to President Donald Trump's desk in late June. All five members of Nebraska's congressional delegation voted for the bill, and both Rep. Mike Flood and Sen. Pete Ricketts authored and/or co-sponsored provisions within it.
Trump initially called the legislation "the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country" in early June. He later referred to it as "a yawn" and held off signing it, tying his support to an unrelated voter ID bill Congress had not yet passed. Ricketts disagreed with the president's stance at the time.
"I would advise the president to take the win," Ricketts said. "This housing bill will help reduce housing costs ... if I was advising the president, I'd tell him, take the win. Talk about it. It's a good bill."
Flood, chairman of the House Housing and Insurance Subcommittee, credited the bill's rare bipartisan support to a shared frustration with legislative gridlock, describing his early conversations with Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the subcommittee's ranking member.
"I don't want to spend my time in Congress with messaging bills that get me a few points on the right when I run in a primary," Flood recalled telling Cleaver. "I want to actually pass a law on affordable housing."
The bill became law automatically on Friday, July 10 after Trump neither signed nor vetoed it within the constitutionally required 10-day window.
The market-rate builder: The real obstacles are local
Nebraska housing industry officials welcomed the new law, but say the housing issue remains more complicated than the bill addresses.
"The biggest obstacles remain local," said Steve Janicek, president of the Metro Omaha Builders Association and operations manager at Regency Homes in Omaha. "The cost of land, rising development and infrastructure costs, labor shortages, higher interest rates, permitting timelines, and increasing regulatory requirements continue to have the greatest impact on housing affordability."
Janicek said he appreciated the bipartisan effort behind the bill, but was skeptical its financial tools would move the needle for builders like his members.
"Financing certainly matters, particularly with today's interest rates affecting buyers' purchasing power. But access to financing is generally not the primary issue for our builder members," Janicek said.
The law raises the cap on how much of a bank's capital can go toward community development investment, from 15% to 20%, and expands what federal block grant funds can be used for — changes he called positive, if limited in their reach for builders like his.
"Those provisions are likely to have a greater impact on affordable housing initiatives, community development organizations, and public-private partnerships than on the typical market-rate single-family builder," Janicek said.
Real progress on housing, he added, will take more than any single law.
"No single federal law will solve the housing shortage," he said. "Real progress will come from continued collaboration between federal, state and local governments."
The affordable housing developer: The tools are more direct
Jake Hoppe, CEO of Hoppe Development, sees several of the same provisions differently. His Lincoln-based company builds mixed-income housing across the state and depends heavily on the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program — which he said hasn't kept pace with demand.
"There were a lot more projects than there were credits available for those projects," Hoppe said. "And so that was reducing the tax credit pricing that we could get."
Raising the cap on how much banks can invest in community development should expand the pool of buyers for those credits, Hoppe said — a meaningful shift for a state that isn't always a first stop for investors coming out of much bigger markets.
The law's expansion of Community Development Block Grant funding, which can now be directed straight into housing construction instead of just infrastructure, drew a similarly measured but positive response.
"Instead of ancillary work that can produce housing, now they can directly invest in housing projects," Hoppe said, pointing to one current project he believes "would better benefit in a big way" if the city of Lincoln applied its new flexibility toward it.
Asked whether the law actually addresses the industry's real problems, Hoppe was careful not to oversell it.
"I mean, the problem is not a single silver bullet," he said. "The bill attempted to address a handful of areas that matter to us that are kind of relooking at the programs and the modernization and making sure that the programs are better fitting the way current building is being done."
The banker: Confirmation from both sides, and a warning on timing
Richard Baier, president and CEO of the Nebraska Bankers Association, said increasing the investment cap could draw in banks not currently involved in affordable housing.
"It really just opens up the pool of investors who would look at projects in Nebraska," said Baier, who testified before a Flood-led congressional hearing in June 2025, before the legislation was even formally introduced.
But like Hoppe, he cautioned that the benefits will take time to show up for housing developers.
"It's not going to be an overnight instantaneous switch," Baier said. "They're already laying the groundwork for projects for 2027 and 2028 ... I'm not sure that they're going to impact the projects which are currently being built in the state."
Baier also distinguished between segments of the housing market.
"You'll see less pressure on those custom builders," he said, "but their challenges continue to be finding subs and being able to get through the permitting process efficiently…Time is money."
Separately, he named what he called the hardest problem in Nebraska to fix — one no provision in this law directly addresses.
"The one issue that we continue to struggle with in Nebraska... is just availability of contractors and subcontractors," Baier said, calling it "a hard one to address through regulation" — echoing, independently, the same labor concern Janicek raised.