A chorus of sounds can be heard along Omaha’s downtown and midtown streets. The rumble of heavy machinery, chatter of construction crews and clattering of broken concrete has for months mapped the progress of the city’s ambitious streetcar project.
There’s a lot riding on the $421 million initiative. City leaders are optimistic the streetcar will revitalize a stagnant urban core, bringing new development, jobs and housing to the heart of the metro. For small businesses along the route, the growing pains of progress make it difficult to see the light at the end of the tracks.
Unpredictable road work is among the biggest challenges for Colin and Jessica Duggan. The couple own and operate Kitchen Table, a downtown restaurant that opened in 2013. Many of their customers are regulars.
“It’s developed like family relationships, who’s doing good in high school football, and who hates freshman year and who just had a baby. And it’s really, yeah, it’s like a whole big family,” Jessica Duggan said.
Through Kitchen Tables’ front windows is a view of the Mutual of Omaha tower. The 44-story building is another major construction project within the downtown corridor. Parking restrictions and street closures related to the tower and the streetcar have made it difficult for regulars to navigate their way to the restaurant.
“One morning there’s this closed, one morning there’s parking spots gone, one morning there’s this lane gone,” Jessica Duggan said. “I mean, I went down the street to get my hair cut, walked down there, and when I went to walk back, I couldn’t walk back the same way.”
What’s to come
Some of the biggest infrastructure projects tied to the streetcar will be underway in the next several months. In early January, the Farnam Street Bridge over Interstate 480 was demolished and will remain closed for most of the year. Major, complex utility work at Turner Boulevard and Farnam Street will close that intersection for four months.
Within the next year, the city will transition from utility-related work into mainline construction, meaning lane and street closures will become more predictable.
Up to this point, the project has required significant construction work by MUD to replace or relocate gas and water lines along the 3.2-mile route. The price tag of that work has more than doubled beyond early cost estimates and has added to the project timeline.
There is an end in sight. Steve Jensen, deputy chief of staff for economic development in the Omaha mayor’s office, said by the middle of 2026, construction work should ease up.
“This is a tough stretch right now, and it’ll be tough until probably late spring, early summer, and then things will start to smooth out a little bit,” Jensen said.
At its core, the streetcar is a development incubator. The fixed-rail system is projected to bring more than $3 billion in new investments to the heart of the metro over the next 15 years.
New development also looks to solve a growing problem. Omaha is running out of room to expand.
The city for decades avoided the stagnation and declining tax base of other older U.S. cities thanks to the annexation powers it has under state law. Omaha’s population could shift into the booming suburbs, even as the urban core thinned out.
But Omaha’s once unlimited space is shrinking. A report from the Greater Omaha Chamber warns that physical and legal barriers will leave Omaha “land-locked.”
“We lost 21,000 jobs in the urban core between the early 1960s and around 2015,” Jensen said. “This is all about revitalizing the urban core, bringing jobs back, bringing more investment, more population, more development, and ultimately that increases the tax base of the city and benefits the entire city.”
Work on the streetcar’s mainline will continue in 2026, with tracks visible in coming months. The streetcar is expected to be open for service in 2028.
As the work continues, local business owners have a lingering question: Will it all be worth it?