If you build it ...
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Kurt Johnson
The accolades were flowing Friday at the Bremer Center, where a year’s worth of hard work and cooperation culminated in a groundbreaking ceremony that promises to literally change the landscape of our community.
Aurora needs affordable housing, and lots of it, NOW, thus the Rural Workforce Housing initiative celebrated Friday is a key ingredient in priming the pump for real and immediate growth on several fronts.
With 64 lots scheduled for development within the next year we can expect to see rooftops going up in bunches, a needed boost from the 11.1 houses per year averaged over the past decade. More houses means more people, more potential employees for our businesses, more students to keep Aurora Public Schools in Class B, and more tax valuation to help fund all of the above.
Every community in Nebraska would love to read the front page ANR headline in their local newspaper this week, but as Gov. Pete Ricketts pointed out it’s not a wish list easily filled. It takes leadership to pull off a project of this scale and Aurora has proven, once again, that its progressive spokes in the wheel way of doing things is alive and well.
The Aurora Housing Development Corporation board and its president, Jannelle Seim, deserve credit and thanks for tackling this project and successfully inviting other partners to the table. It’s a collaborative effort to be sure, with local donors, the Aurora Development Corporation, Streeter LLC, builders and city leaders all providing some skin in the game, but AHDC had the vision and focus to lead the way. More specifically, Seim, ADC executive director Kelsey Bergen and long-time community leader Gary Warren worked tirelessly over the past year to launch a project that ended up bigger and better than even they initially imagined.
As exciting as Friday’s groundbreaking was, the really amazing thing is that this project has the potential to keep going and growing, with a $2 million revolving loan fund earmarked exclusively for building more and more affordable houses for years to come.
“If you build it, they will come” isn’t just a line in a famous movie. On Aurora’s western edge, it’s a real and visible promise for the future.
-- Kurt Johnson
