Priced out of The Good Life: For young Nebraskans, homeownership grows increasingly out of reach 11%
By Natalia Alamdari14%
7/31/2026, 3:50:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Negativity Bias, and Pessimism Bias, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 14.1% saturation with 442 hits. Analysis detected 2,911 faulty-reasoning hits from 3,132 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 24.5% and a BS Rank of 11% (21,238 of 23,701 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 89.60% of the article peer group.
Nebraska paychecks are stagnant.
Home prices continue to spiral.
It’s pricing out a generation of buyers.
Maggie and Coby Smallridge spend time with their dogs Lucy, left, and Sam at their rental home in Louisville.
Owning a home would mean more room for the dogs and the ability to paint and make renovations without landlord permission, Maggie said.
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
Maggie and Coby Smallridge were ready to buy a home.
The couple in their mid-twenties got preapproved for a loan.
They found a real estate agent.
Their government-backed loan made the idea of homeownership seem doable.
But with every house, they ran into a set of new roadblocks becoming all too familiar to this state’s current generation of potential homeowners.
Houses in their price range vanished before the couple could even schedule a showing.
They lost bidding wars to buyers paying cash.
Sellers said no to their USDA loan — too much red tape.
They looked in Ashland.
Louisville.
Yutan.
Weeping Water.
Greenwood.
The few houses in their budget of $200,000 kept disappearing.
“It was just nonstop, just being bought out,” Maggie Smallridge said.
“We didn’t even have choices.”
Coby and Maggie Smallridge moved into their two-bedroom rental house in Louisville two years ago.
The couple tried looking for a home to buy but struggled to find anything livable in their budget.
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
For generations, Nebraskans have boasted the bargain of “The Good Life.”
Choose to live in a state like California, New York or Colorado and you can have beaches, mountains, a city that never sleeps — and an eye-popping mortgage or rent payment to match.
Choose Nebraska and you’ll get a calmer pace in a stable place to raise a family.
Good schools and economic stability.
And the cornerstone of the American dream: a home you can afford.
The chance to generate wealth that comes with it.
But for the current generation of young adult Nebraskans, that last piece of The Good Life is proving harder and harder to grab.
Paychecks aren’t keeping up with what it costs to buy a home.
And it’s pricing out young Nebraskans like the Smallridges hoping to make the jump to homeownership, like their parents and grandparents did.
Priced out of The Good Life
Year after year, The Good Life is becoming less attainable for Nebraskans.
Paychecks can’t keep up with home prices.
It’s pricing out young Nebraskans who dream of becoming homeowners.
It’s leading to apartments outpacing single-family homes in Omaha’s construction scene and skyrocketing home prices in Lincoln.
It’s forcing bidding wars in the smallest of towns and pushing communities to try out new solutions like down payment assistance.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine the realities and barriers to homeownership across the state.
From 1970 to 2024, the median household income in Nebraska, adjusted for inflation, grew by 40%.
In that same time frame, the median home price more than doubled.
And it has grown far worse since the COVID-19 pandemic: From 2020 to 2024, the median household income in Nebraska grew by a fraction of a percent.
Home prices skyrocketed 20%.
Put plainly: In more than 50 years, home prices grew three times faster than incomes.
In just four years, Nebraska home prices grew an astonishing 72 times faster than our incomes.
“We keep telling people (out of state) that we have this low cost of living.
It might feel low compared to them, but it has increased so much for us,” said Josie Gatti Schafer, director of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
“It’s the people in the state who feel the rising costs of housing … we have priced ourselves out of our own market.”
The problem runs border to border.
In Lincoln’s Lancaster County, housing eats up more of people’s paychecks than anywhere else in the state.
In Omaha, lagging house construction is leading to an apartment-building boom.
Rural towns have turned to solutions like offering free land or handing out tens of thousands of dollars in down payment assistance to convince people to build new homes.
And it’s also uniquely hammering the state’s young adults.
More millennials carry student loan debt than the generations before them.
Young adults are getting married and forming two-income households later in life, making it harder to buy a home.
And when they do try, they face a shortage of more than 120,000 housing units and skyrocketing prices that outpace their paychecks.
Laurie Goodman, Urban Institute Research Fellow (Courtesy photo)
“The burden falls on young people,” said Laurie Goodman, an Urban Institute fellow specializing in housing finance policy.
“If you think of someone who’s been a homeowner for a long time and home prices go up, it doesn’t really affect them … if you think about someone who was renting and wants to buy for the first time, that rise in housing costs relative to income is just killer.”
Homeowners, renters and buyers in their own words
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
Joe Cannia, 33, owns two homes and a cabin in the Sarpy County area with his wife and 3-year-old son.
“It was exactly what you do coming out of college being poor, right?
You have roommates.
So even though we’re getting married, I’m literally living with my cousin, my brother, my wife.
We’re sitting in a two-bedroom apartment with four people.
And even when we bought our first house, my cousin moved from that apartment with us to my first house and paid rent to stay in the room.”
Daniel, 36, was living in Kearney when the pandemic hit.
He moved home to Lexington to live with his parents.
He still lives in his parents’ house and commutes 40 minutes to Kearney in order to save money.
“I’ve been able to save some money … I’m also simultaneously paying off some credit card debt.
But the saving is a couple hundred bucks a month.
I’m very thankful, I’m grateful for it … but at this rate, I’ll be able to afford a down payment in like two decades or something.
I’ll be more than halfway dead by then.”
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
Brenden O’Brien, 27, put in at least 20 offers on homes in the Omaha area with his wife from 2021 to 2023.
More often than not, they were beaten out by a cash buyer.
They now plan to buy their rental from their landlord.
“We were being very, very picky.
But this was a serious financial commitment, too.
I’ve done all the right things.
I checked all the boxes that everybody had told me to do growing up.
And here I am, trying to do what I was told, like get a good job and get out of debt.
We were coming in with enough money for a significant down payment, and we weren’t able to buy a home.
It was kind of like, where did I go wrong?”
Maggie Smallridge knew the pandemic had changed the housing market.
She just didn’t realize how much.
In 2018, she and her husband were ready to start college.
They were in no position to buy a house, she said.
“But crap, if we could go back, we should have,” she said.
And she’s right — Nebraskans can afford much less home today than they could before the pandemic.
In 2019, the median Nebraska household income was about $61,440.
On average, most people can afford a home roughly 2.5 times their income, according to the federal government .
You shouldn’t spend more than 30% of your income on housing when utilities and insurance are included, according to the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development .
So in 2019, an affordable home for the median Nebraska household cost roughly $163,598 — close to the median home value of $155,800 at the time.
But within five years, that cost-to-income difference soared.
By 2024, the median household income in Nebraska was $76,475.
An affordable home for that salary would cost roughly $201,188.
The median home price in the state that year: $238,600.
To afford the median 2024 home, the average Nebraskan household would need to make an additional $15,000 a year.
“That is really, really difficult for a young family that doesn’t have anything to sell in order to buy,” said Cliff Mesner, co-owner of Mesner Development.
“If you have money in a house, then you can sell that house and roll it into another house.”
Can you afford an “affordable” home in Nebraska?
This calculator estimates a rough “affordable” home price using a common rule of thumb: roughly 2.5 times your gross annual income, plus a $10,000 down payment.
Enter your income and pick a county to see how that number compares to actual home values across the state.
The growing gap between wages and home prices is in part because of the pandemic.
Low interest rates and moving fever kicked off a homebuying trend, fueling the price increases we still see today.
Nelson Jett, North Platte real estate agent (Courtesy photo)
“People weren’t afraid of paying $30,000, $50,000 over asking price just to have the house (if) there were seven offers and they wanted it and it was their dream home,” said Nelson Jett, a North Platte-area real estate agent.
“So when they go to sell it, they want their 50 grand back.
And so they lift (the price) clear up there, and then it sells again clear up there.”
But it’s also an aftershock of the Great Recession.
The 2008 financial crisis put building crews and developers out of business; foreclosures flooded the market with cheap existing homes; it was harder for buyers to qualify for mortgages.
The nation’s construction industry screeched to a halt.
“We built 5 million fewer homes that decade than we did any decade since World War II,” Mesner said.
“One (construction crew) after another went bankrupt or went someplace else.
The work wasn’t there because nobody was building the housing.”
Nebraska went from over 10,000 building permits issued in 2004 to a low of 5,150 in 2009, according to census data.
Since then, construction has picked up, but the lack of housing supply remains: Nebraska’s construction workforce still lags.
Land is costly.
The pandemic brought extreme spikes in the cost of materials, then Biden-era inflation and now Trump administration tariffs have kept those costs high.
As a state, we aren’t building fast enough to keep up with an aging housing stock.
“The supply choked, but the demand didn’t,” said Shannon Harner, executive director of the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority.
“You see this gap between what’s affordable and what’s available.”
Earlier this month, Congress passed a bipartisan package of laws aimed at narrowing that gap.
The package included adjusting federal regulations to make it easier and cheaper for developers to build and tightened restrictions on large institutional investors buying up single-family homes.
The bill, sponsored by Nebraska’s U.S.
Rep.
Mike Flood, will hopefully lower housing costs by increasing the supply, he said.
When Flood graduated college, the idea of homeownership was more expected, the Republican said.
He and most of his friends bought homes by the time they were in their mid-twenties.
“That’s the American dream, and right now, the American dream really only happens for first-time homebuyers on average at age 40, which is completely ridiculous,” Flood said.
In West Point, a teacher backed out of a job because she couldn’t find a place to live, he said.
In Columbus, there are 800 open jobs but not enough places for those potential workers to live.
“It’s that group of people that we are trying to be attractive to (as a state),” UNO’s Schafer said.
“Being able to buy something you both like and is affordable to you is definitely going to keep people at least thinking about staying in the state longer.”
Homeowners, renters and buyers in their own words
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
Elliot Gonnella, 29, works in Lincoln and recently purchased a home in Otoe County.
To afford a home, he saved money by walking to work, skipping restaurants and entertainment, taking overtime shifts and even keeping his thermostat low in the winter to save on utilities.
“I wound up needing major surgery, and that cleaned out some of my accounts, even with insurance.
That experience really taught me the value of money and needing to save for events like this.
The apartment was nice, but with the rates constantly going up and not having much to show for it, I decided early on I’ll need a house sooner rather than later, and I better start spending with that in mind … what if the water heater goes, am I going to have the funds for that?”
Kayla McKain, 38, and her wife started saving up for a mortgage once they got married in 2022.
Last year, they bought their first home near Millard.
“Up until I met my current wife, I really was just kind of set on being a renter forever.
(I thought) I’m never going to be able to get there with just my income.
We had double the savings.
I could save as much as I wanted as a single person, I feel like I would have been saving for 10 years.
But because I had a spouse that was saving with me for that same goal, we could get there in half the time.”
Gerald Fraas, 29, has been house hunting in Lincoln on and off since 2019.
Frequently, homes in his price range of $150,000 to $300,000 are in poor condition and would require costly repairs.
“The upstairs was fine … but when we got to the basement, it was very apparent from the cracks on the floor, the walls … that it was very much falling apart.
There’s a glue trap in the corner … and there are garter snakes on the glue trap ….
I would say Nebraska is very affordable.
It’s just the hesitance of taking the next step to buy and go from $800 to $2,000 a month.”
Melissa Roman thought a house would be within her means.
She was already able to afford $800 in rent on her three-bedroom Hastings apartment.
She had just gotten a raise as a phlebotomist.
That, plus the extra money she brought home through overtime and picking up shifts as a certified nursing assistant could cover a couple hundred dollars more toward a mortgage payment, she thought.
It would mean a home for the 34-year-old and her two daughters — a yard, being able to paint her girls’ rooms without needing permission, maybe a pet.
But financing a home was easier said than done: Banks didn’t like that Roman had less than two years of experience working in healthcare.
They wanted proof that she had thousands of dollars in the bank.
She needed to find a cosigner because of the car loan and credit card she was still paying off.
Roman’s boyfriend was willing to cosign, and she had a $6,000 down payment — money that would have drained her savings.
But three-bedroom homes in Hastings were either out of her $200,000 budget or needed costly repairs.
“What if we come across a leak … or if we need to replace something?
Then I wouldn’t be able to have that money for backup,” Roman said.
“You basically have to accept a cheap house with a bunch of problems … but is it even worth it to have a lower mortgage if the house is falling apart?”
For years, the gap between rentals and monthly payments on a home has been widening.
In Omaha in 2016, rents averaged $886, compared to $1,271 in monthly payments on a home, according to Zillow.
That’s a $385 difference.
Today, though, the average Omaha rent is $1,443, compared to a $2,760 monthly home payment — a $1,317 difference.
“People normally have a bias towards, ‘Oh, I want to own a home eventually, it’s the American dream,” Goodman of the Urban Institute said.
“The economics now are such that it makes many pause … it’s more favorable to rent than has historically been the case.”
Housing in Nebraska is still cheaper than the country as a whole.
The median home price in the state is nearly $100,000 lower than the national median of $332,700.
Nebraska’s price-to-income ratio of 3.1 — how many years a household must work to afford a home — is also lower than the national ratio of 4.1.
But Nebraska’s price-to-income ratio is growing faster than both its neighbors and the country.
From 2020 to 2024, Nebraska’s price-to-income ratio surged by 20%.
The national price-to-income ratio grew by 16% in that same time frame.
“We’re not affordable for Nebraskans,” Schafer said.
“If you’re trying to move from that starter home to a larger home, in the last 10 years, that house has gone up so much, you’re now priced out of that market and you’re stuck in your starter home or you’re stuck in your rental.”
In North Platte, Jett finds that the new builds meant to be starter homes are too expensive — between $300,000 and $350,000 — for many first-time buyers in the area.
Those prospective buyers can afford a price tag in the $200,000 to $250,000 range, he said.
But there are a lot fewer homes in that sweet spot, said Ashley Kaiser, an Albion-based real estate agent.
“There’s just not a lot available, so when something comes up … you end up in a bidding war.”
Kim Zwiener, Nebraska Realtors Association President (courtesy)
Kim Zwiener, president of the Nebraska Realtors Association, said she has seen more young clients who will buy a home and rent rooms to friends to help pay their mortgage, or young adults who are only able to afford a down payment because of an inheritance.
She thinks about her first home, bought for $65,000 in 2002 — $122,568 in today’s dollars.
“There’s no way you could find a livable home for $65,000 right now,” she said.
The Smallridges tried to find something livable within their means.
It didn’t feel like they were asking for a lot with their list of non-negotiables: two or three bedrooms, a garage and a yard.
But after four months of house hunting, they let their preapproved loan expire.
They stopped looking in September 2023.
Maggie still takes a peek at Zillow every week, just to see what’s out there.
“I get depressed every time I look,” she said.
Maggie and Coby Smallridge spend time with their dogs Lucy, left, and Sam in Louisville.
The couple tried buying a home, but repeatedly were outbid.
Photo by Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press
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