This article is part of the series, "Costly: Stories about affordability from The Midwest Newsroom."
When Chuck Martens could no longer afford his rent, he came up with a solution. He negotiated with his landlords to swap his labor for a rent reduction. Now Martens does landscape work for his Omaha apartment complex. Seven days a week, he mows the grass, collects trash and wields a leaf blower. Hedge trimming is his favorite.
“It’s like you’re doing an ice sculpture, but with a trimmer instead of a chainsaw,” Martens, 77, said.
Martens also changes the locks when tenants move in or out or need replacement keys. He cleans the hallways and even shows apartments to prospective renters.
“Some weeks I hardly have anything to do,” Martens said. “And then other weeks it’s just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.”
His apartment near downtown Omaha costs over $1,200 a month, and his sole source of income is Social Security, which amounts to just over $1,600 a month. He worked out a deal with his landlords to exchange rent credits for landscaping and other work around the complex. This brings his rent down to just over $200 a month. He spoke with Nebraska Public Media and The Midwest Newsroom just a few days after getting his monthly Social Security payment.
“I have less than $100 to last me the rest of the month, and that’s not even covering all the bills yet,” Martens said.
In April, The Midwest Newsroom surveyed people from Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, asking what factors are affecting their ability to afford living expenses. Of the 61 Nebraskans who responded, 50 listed rent and housing among their biggest financial pressure points.
Rental prices for a one-bedroom, like Martens’ home, have gone up 40% nationally since 2021, according to a study by LendingTree. Zillow reports Nebraska rents are 33% below the national average.
But the U.S. Census Bureau reports rent in Nebraska has increased nearly 29% since 2019. The median price was $859 a month in 2019 and is now $1,102 a month. The trend in higher rent includes all apartment sizes, from studio to multi-bedroom, statewide.
Of the questionnaire respondents who agreed to an interview, all said that they once considered the Midwest to be an affordable place but that that’s changing.
“What we’re finding is that, although Nebraska really looks like an affordable place to rent, if you just look at the sticker price,” Catherine Harvey, senior policy manager at the Urban Institute, said, “that is a much more complicated picture when you start to look at what people are actually earning in our state.”
The Nebraska Investment Finance Authority weighed the incomes of people in different labor sectors against what they could afford in rent. Food service workers can afford, on average, $721 a month. Office workers can swing just over $1,000. The authority estimated the median household income of Nebraska’s renters is a little over $41,000 a year.
Yonah Freemark, a researcher on land use and housing with the Urban Institute, said the national conversation around affordable housing has been buzzing louder in recent years. While cities along the coast like New York and San Francisco were once the high-price hotspots, Freemark said, affordability, or lack thereof, has moved inland.
“In places like Nebraska, folks who are in poverty and who need assistance to be able to actually afford their rent are not getting the support that they used to from the federal government,” Freemark said.
“You can see that divergence, and that’s why people feel like they can’t keep up with the rising cost of housing,” Harvey said.
She said Nebraska needs 34,000 more units of affordable and market rate rentals to meet demand.
What is affordable?
The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that 70% of Nebraska’s extremely low income renters have a severe cost burden in rent, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent before groceries, childcare and utilities. There are more than 61,000 extremely low income renters in Nebraska. About 250,000 people in the state rent their homes.
People who spoke with Nebraska Public Media and The Midwest Newsroom said they’re sleeping on friends’ futons. Others are living with several roommates in an apartment. Still others say they live with their extended family to economize on housing.
Jean Shea, 65, of Grand Island, makes do by living with her ex-boyfriend, which is tenuous at best. She only gets $640 a month in Social Security, and while friends have been looking for affordable housing for her for three months, she is still unable to move.
“I’m trapped,” Shea said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of here.”
Jake Hoppe is CEO of Lincoln-based Hoppe Development, a housing company that builds rental properties. He said the profile of people who need access to affordable housing has changed since he started working in the industry in 2019.
Affordable housing is usually defined as housing for which the tenant pays no more than 30% of their gross income for housing costs, including utilities, although it also often applies to tenants paying up to 60%.
“They might be a public service provider, a firefighter, a teacher,” Hoppe said. “What we’re finding more and more is that (affordable housing) is looking more like workforce housing than it is low-income housing.”
Workforce housing refers to people in professions generally considered to be middle-income, such as teachers and police officers. These people typically make between 60% and 120% of an area median income.
Hoppe said that in this economy – with inflation showing no sign of abating – plenty of folks who qualify for market-rate rentals are still applying for affordable housing, because that’s what they can afford as other costs increase. This kind of housing is typically offered by public housing authorities, private property management companies or nonprofits to those who make between 30% and 60% of a given area’s median income. Whenever Hoppe Development wants to create rentals for people above the 60% income requirement, they typically have to find alternative funding sources to government subsidies.
Jody Holston, executive director of housing solutions nonprofit Front Porch Investments, said her company has successfully partnered with Omaha to get this alternative funding through something called tax increment financing – commonly known as TIF – a public financing method used by municipalities. It usually raises funds for redevelopment, infrastructure and community-improvement projects.
“It is one of the few tools that the city has that we can modify to make sure that, if we are using public benefits and public money, that we’re seeing the type of public benefit back to the community,” Holston said.
Front Porch Investments offers grants and loans to housing nonprofits, lobbies for policy to help pave the way for housing construction and searches for solutions. Those solutions include exploring new cost-effective designs and finding other ways to keep building expenses down.
“It’s land costs, it’s construction, it’s financing costs, infrastructure,” Holston said. “It’s the time it takes to get things permitted and developed, and all of the regulations that affect how much things cost and what gets built and what doesn’t get built.”
She said local policy can often bar new housing construction in certain neighborhoods, usually desirable neighborhoods that tend to only have single-family homes. Yonah Freemark, the Urban Institute researcher, added that when state and federal governments don’t offer enough housing resources, either people end up spending too much on rent or they become unhoused.
“You can’t wish poverty away by not investing in people’s housing needs,” Freemark said. “We have experienced an increasing share of folks who are homeless, unfortunately, and that is a direct result of high housing costs.”
‘You can never get caught up’
A 2026 poll from the National Association of Realtors found about 52% of voters said the availability of affordable housing is a very important election issue.
Housing affordability is one of a few topics Republicans, Democrats and Independents seem to agree on. Both the House and Senate passed the 21st Century Road to Housing Act in June. As part of the legislation, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will offer a competitive grant for governments at all levels to support planning and community development. Governments that prove they have been increasing their housing supply can apply for still more competitive grants.
The legislation includes an expansion of government rental assistance and affordable housing construction programs. When asked how the bill will help Nebraskans who struggle to pay rent, Sen. Pete Ricketts said the legislation addresses the high costs of building rental units.
“Forty percent of the cost of new apartments is these regulations,” Ricketts, a Republican, said. “If we can cut some of this red tape, it will make it less expensive to build these apartments.”
On June 24, President Donald Trump refused to sign the bill until the SAVE Act, which would change state voting requirements, passes in both houses. The housing law is likely to go into effect anyway, because it passed with a veto-proof majority.
It’s not yet clear how the legislation will affect renters like Chuck Martens, who is considering his voting options ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. He said he is registered as an Independent, and has voted for Republicans in local elections while voting for Democrats in races for Nebraska’s officially nonpartisan Legislature.
Martens said he has never voted for a Republican at the federal level and blames Congress for Social Security funding. He pointed to a June report from Social Security trustees, projecting that one of Social Security’s reserve funds will run dry at the end of 2032, one quarter earlier than previously anticipated. The second fund would be depleted by 2034, the report says.
“If I am struggling now, what is it going to be like in 2032 when they have to cut my benefits?” Martens said. “I’ll be out on the street. They need to raise or eliminate the cap on the amount of income that is taxed by Social Security.”
For now, Martens’ budget is stretched thin. In June he had to renew his driver’s license, which cost $29. Every six months he pays for car insurance, with a price tag of $257. When he runs short on cash, he covers the rest of his expenses with credit cards or cuts back on food.
“You can never get caught up,” Martens said. “I’ve been selling books, I’ve been selling things that my mother saved, toys I played with when I was a kid.”
When Martens thinks about the future of renting, he faces a lot of uncertainty. On his current income, Martens said he can’t afford to move, and maintaining his health is a struggle.
“Last year, I had to have open heart surgery, I had a triple bypass,” Martens said.
While Martens spent three months in recovery, unable to lift more than 10 pounds or push or pull equipment around, his landlords paid other people to do his work around the apartment complex. They still gave him the credits toward his rent. Still, he wonders what’s to come, since he’s already working well past the typical retirement age.
“I try not to think of the future, because when the day comes that I can’t physically do the work here, I have no place to live,” Martens said. “It’s frightening, and there are so many of us that are in the same boat.”
The Midwest Newsroom is an investigative and enterprise journalism collaboration that includes Iowa Public Radio, KCUR, Nebraska Public Media, St. Louis Public Radio and NPR. There are many ways you can contact us with story ideas and leads, and you can find that information here. The Midwest Newsroom is a partner of The Trust Project. We invite you to review our ethics and practices here.
METHODOLOGY
Reporter Noelle Annonen collected and analyzed housing data from multiple housing and government websites, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority and the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She also interviewed more than a dozen Nebraskans to better understand the impact of affordability and housing in the state. She identified many of the people she interviewed through a questionnaire created by The Midwest Newsroom and distributed in April 2026.
REFERENCES
HUD Fair Market Rents | U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research, 2026
Nebraska Quick Facts | United States Census Bureau, 2025
Rental Market Challenges | Nebraska Investment Finance Authority, 2023
Nebraska Housing Market Trends | Realtor.com, 2026
Tax Increment Financing Explainer | Good Jobs First, 2026
Nebraska Housing Gap Report | National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2026
Nebraska Rental Market | Zillow, 2026
Fair Market Rent Increases | LendingTree, 2025
Affordable Housing Income Limits | City of Lincoln, June 1, 2026
Nebraska’s Strategic Housing Framework | Nebraska Investment Finance Authority, 2026
Material Costs Affect Housing Affordability | National Association of Home Builders, 2026
Monthly New Residential Construction | United States Census Bureau, June 16, 202
21st Century Road To Housing Act Explainer | Bipartisan Policy Center, March 10, 2026
Social Security Trustees Report | Social Security Administration, June 9, 2026
TYPE OF ARTICLE
News – Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
