There's Construction Up and Down North 24th Street. Only One Project Has Actually Broken Ground.

Crews digging along North 24th Street this year hit something that wasn't on any modern blueprint: actual streetcar rails, still buried in the roadbed, left over from a transit line that ran through the corridor until the late 1940s. The discovery surfaced in local news the same week the city announced it had secured federal money to study bringing the streetcar back to this same stretch of road.

If you live in North Central or Northeast Omaha, you've probably folded all of this into one story: the neighborhood is finally getting its long-promised makeover, and the barrels and news trucks are proof it's happening. That's close, but it's not quite right. Four separate projects have made news on North 24th Street this year, funded by different agencies on different timelines, and only one of them has actual dirt moving right now. Knowing which is which tells you what to expect this year versus what's still a few years out.

The One That Already Broke Ground

On April 17, 2026, city and community leaders held a groundbreaking ceremony for Phase 2 of the North Omaha Trail, an eight-mile multi-use path that will eventually connect 24th and Ohio through Creighton University's campus toward downtown. The ceremony itself briefly closed North 26th Street and a stretch of Ohio Street that afternoon, from 1 to 4 p.m., according to the city's own street closing notice for the event.

Council member Lavonya Goodwin, who spent years as executive director of the North 24th Street Business Improvement District before her current role, called this a moment of "building and renaissance" driven by the community itself. Architectural designer Davielle Phillip framed the project differently, describing it as a way to reverse the effects of Highway 75, which she said cut through and divided neighborhoods when it was built decades ago. Both framings point to the same practical fact: this is the one project on the corridor where construction is underway now, not promised for later.

The One Everyone's Been Waiting On Since Before This Trail Existed

The North 24th Street Streetscape has been in planning far longer than the trail. As of May 2026, Phase 1 design work was reported at 90 percent complete, with construction not expected to start until early 2027. The project covers 15 blocks from Ohio Street to Sahler Street and will bring new curbs, sidewalks, lighting, trees, bus benches, and a traffic-calming roundabout at 24th and Binney, according to reporting from 3 News Now.

That gap between "90 percent designed" and "construction starts" matters if you're trying to plan around it. A tentative bid letting is expected this fall, per the North 24th Street Business Improvement District's own project page, and the city's Keep Omaha Moving portal lists the next public partners meeting for October 26, 2026, if you want to see the near-final design before shovels are in the ground. If you're expecting the sidewalk and lighting work to disrupt your block this year, it won't. That disruption is a 2027 story.

The One That Isn't Construction at All

The streetcar announcement is the easiest of the four to misread, because it arrived attached to a genuinely interesting fact: this corridor once had exactly what the study is now examining. The rails crews uncovered belonged to two former routes, one running north to 30th and Spaulding and another running south into the old stockyards district, according to Omaha Streetcar Operations Manager Eric Miller in WOWT's August 5 report. Streetcar service on North 24th Street ran until the late 1940s.

What was announced this month is a feasibility study, not a construction timeline. There's no funded route, no groundbreaking date, and no guarantee the study leads anywhere in particular. Jeffery Stewart, who has run a Jamaican clothing store along North 24th Street for close to five years, put the practical concern well: bringing a streetcar before there's enough to see or do along the route risks being "counterproductive on the front end." His view is that investment in businesses needs to lead, with the streetcar following, not the other way around.

Four Projects, Four Different Clocks

What's Actually Open Right Now

While the bigger infrastructure projects sort out their timelines, the corridor's day-to-day business mix keeps shifting in smaller, more immediate ways:

• Clover 24, the former Kitty Clover potato chip factory at 24th and Martha, is becoming a community hub of art studios and workspaces, with SHARE Omaha moving its operations in this summer.
• Fair Deal Village MarketPlace at 2118 North 24th Street remains the corridor's anchor grocery and gathering spot, built on the footprint of the original Fair Deal Cafe, a meeting place for local leaders from the 1940s through the 1970s.
• Stable Gray, a marketing and web services firm founded in 2015, moved its main office into the Fabric development at 2520 North 24th Street, keeping its original space on North 45th Street as a dedicated photo and video studio.
• The Shirley Tyree Theater, part of The Union for Contemporary Art near 24th and Lake, has been under renovation as part of the same wave of adaptive reuse projects reshaping older buildings on the block.
• Longstanding businesses like Transitions Barber and Beauty, run by Damion Sayers, and Styles of Evolution, owned by Don and Yvonne McPherson, continue to anchor the block the way they have for years, giving the corridor's newer projects a lived-in backdrop rather than a blank slate.

What This Means If You Live Here

If you're trying to figure out what to expect for the rest of 2026, the honest answer depends on which project you're asking about. Trail-related work and the occasional short street closure are a this-year reality. The streetscape's curbs, lighting, and roundabout are a 2027 reality, with public meetings this fall if you want a preview. The streetcar is a conversation that may or may not turn into anything, on no announced schedule. And the business openings, the ones actually changing what's available to walk into on a given afternoon, are happening steadily in the background of all three bigger stories.

None of these four projects answers to the others. They're funded separately, managed by separate agencies, and moving at separate speeds. The corridor isn't being remade all at once. It's being remade in overlapping layers, and this year happens to be the one where you can see all four layers moving at the same time.

If you're weighing what any of this means for property values, timing, or whether now is the right moment to buy or sell near this corridor, that's a more specific conversation. Contact a Good Life Group agent at Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate | The Good Life Group to talk through what these overlapping projects could mean for your particular block and timeline.