A cool morning breeze floated through the serene, green middle of the Highlander development in the heart of North Omaha, and on that breeze wafted the gentle exhortations of a yoga teacher.

“Inhale, breathe in,” the teacher, Lindsay Decker, urged 15 people stretching toward the sky on the deck of a community gathering space. “Exhale, let it go.”

As she eased the people into their Saturday morning practice, drum music reverberated inside an event venue next to the lawn. The joyful noise came from a drill team pumping up spectators and competitors at the annual North Omaha Powerlifting Championships.

Around the yogis and the weightlifters, Highlander residents were beginning their weekends in the complex’s 300-plus apartments, townhomes and duplexes that surround its community and business spaces.

The scene unfolded on what a decade ago was the long-vacant site of a demolished former public housing complex, Pleasant View Homes, in a historic neighborhood once nearly wiped out by the construction of the North Freeway.

Led by North Omaha native son Othello Meadows, community leaders, city planners, philanthropists and business people launched an effort to revitalize the neighborhood with a development centered on high-quality housing. It also included business education and nonprofit support services. The goal: Increase prosperity and quality of life in North Omaha.

The final Highlander buildings were finished in 2025, 10 years after the groundbreaking.

Now, the building of community is underway, within Highlander and with its immediate neighborhood and beyond.

“I kind of think of it as making the house a home,” said Sharlon Rodgers, president and CEO of Seventy Five North Revitalization Corp., the nonprofit created to build, own and manage Highlander.

“We’re aiming to return the community as a whole to a place that feels vibrant, that feels like it’s a place where people can live their lives holistically with the conveniences that you find in other communities and neighborhoods …” Rodgers said.

Highlander rises beside North 30th Street between Cuming and Lake streets, north of Creighton University and not far from downtown Omaha. It’s next door to Salem Baptist Church,  built where the former Hilltop Homes public housing complex stood.

Highlander itself sits on what was once Pleasant View, the housing project where Sherman Wells moved when he was 2.

Wells remembers, as a child, lining up for government commodities like cheese and giant jars of peanut butter, on a spot where the Highlander sits. He also remembers friends and neighbors dying there, in the violence that plagued the housing project in the 1980s.

Wells is now the co-founder of U.N.T.A.M.E.D., a community organization dedicated to uplifting the African American community.

He can still see the past — his own and North Omaha’s — when he drives by the development. 

“A lot of souls rest on that land,” he said.

The housing at Highlander now features a variety of architectural styles and building arrangements. It includes courtyard-style apartments, walk-ups in three-story buildings, duplexes, two-story row houses, senior living and townhomes and apartments with as few as one and up to five bedrooms.

An estimated 800 people now live in Highlander’s 310 apartments. The housing is rented to people with a mix of incomes — a goal of its founders and requirement of the federal funding that helped pay for it.

About one-third of the units rent at market rate. The other two-thirds are income-restricted affordable housing with lower rents.

The housing surrounds a community hub called The Accelerator. It is filled with amenities and services intended to support quality of life and financial growth.

Metropolitan Community College, Creighton University and Charles Drew Health Center all have space in The Accelerator. A Nebraska Enterprise Fund office there helps people start and grow small businesses. The Accelerator also houses restaurants, including the iconic Big Mama’s and a Hardy Coffee shop, and The Greenhouse, a literal greenhouse where residents can grow produce year round.

The Venue, where the 2025 power lifting championships took place, is a 4,000-square-foot event space that people can rent for weddings, quinceañeras and anniversaries, conferences and other gatherings.

Wells has been to weddings in the space, and sometimes suggests Big Mama’s for meetings — especially, he says, when he’s meeting with white people not from the neighborhood. He knows that younger Black Omahans live and hang out here.

But he has lingering doubts that the Highlander is truly for residents who once lived in the housing project that stood on the site. For people like him.

“Having this place here is a good thing,” he said. “But you sometimes wonder: Are we welcome in these places?”

The Greenhouse boosts nutrition by allowing produce to be grown year round.  A commercial and distribution space offers opportunities for training and entrepreneurship. And there’s the Micro Market, a store selling fresh produce and other healthy food, some of it grown in the greenhouse. The market is open to the public. Highlander residents can get vegetables and fruit free or at a discount.

The store comes in handy, Highlander resident Sue Harris said while browsing in the Micro Market on a recent evening. It’s where she buys onions, potatoes, fresh fruit and vegetables.

The market helps address a shortage of fresh produce in the neighborhood, as do seasonal farmers markets in The Accelerator parking lot. Neighborhood residents with small businesses sell goods and wares there, too. The markets are open to the general public — an attempt to provide an amenity to Highlander residents, while also trying to serve the wider community.

Exercise classes, such as yoga, aim to do the same. Highlander has free outdoor yoga on Saturdays at 9 a.m. in summer and fall. They’re open to the public. They draw people from Highlander and North Omaha as well as other neighborhoods. The classes will start up again June 6.

Misha Frazier has been rolling out her mat at Highlander for two years.

“It’s a great community, and I love the space here,” she said after yoga wrapped up one day last August.

Having lived as a child a block away from what’s now Highlander, when the area was still public housing projects, the 35-year-old Frazier marveled at the transformation the development brought.

She said she and friends have often had conversations about how when they were kids, “none of this was happening” in North Omaha. People can do things in North Omaha now that they would have had to go to west Omaha to do when she was younger.

“To see the change and growth has been inspiring, and also to be able to see Black people not get displaced out of this area,” Frazier said. “We’re still very much welcome here. … I tell people all the time, ‘We deserve nice things.’”

Frazier started doing yoga about four years ago to ease her post-COVID lockdown cabin fever. She went with a friend to a class taught by Lindsay Decker.

“It really just resonated with me in a way that I did not expect,” Frazier said.

Frazier, who does health and wellness work and dance choreography, was inspired to pursue yoga teacher certification herself. She started an outdoor yoga series at the Healing Roots African Diaspora Garden on North 24th Street, seeking to make yoga more accessible in North Omaha.

“I think Black and brown people don’t necessarily have, how can I say this, yoga’s not really promoted to us, right?” Frazier said. “Our wellness isn’t something that’s generally on the forefront.”

She likes how Highlander is drawing people in, and also spreading ripples of health and wellness into the wider community.

Harris, the Highlander resident shopping at the Micro Market recently, hasn’t caught the yoga bug. She is partial to another outdoor fitness class offered at Highlander, MixxedFit. It’s also free and open to the public. It starts up again June 1 at 6 p.m.

“I love that, it’s a hip-hop dance class, and they have a crowd,” she said.

Harris has lived at Highlander for five years. She likes her apartment, and she likes the development. The housing and amenities are high quality. It feels stable, and she feels comfortable.

But it doesn’t necessarily feel like a neighborhood to her.

“Not in the way I think it can be,” Harris said. “Like people looking out for each other, whatever race and culture and language you are. I think there’s a divide there.”

People in her building know each other to say hello, and they get along, but she’d like more of a neighborly feel. Part of the challenge, she said, is that quite a few people came from other countries and some don’t speak English.

“We’re trying to bridge the gap, bring people together. And I think we’re headed towards there,” Harris said.“ We just aren’t there yet. But I have high hopes for Highlander. I really do.”

Seventy Five North leaders are working on that. They established a resident committee and seek input from members. They have a monthly dinner for residents that has tripled in size in the past year, to about 70 people, said Hannah Grenewich, communications coordinator for Highlander.

She said there’s “a growing excitement among Highlander residents to get involved, to start things in their neighborhood and to get to know their neighbors.”

Greenwich cited a neighborhood food pantry started in response to SNAP cuts near the end of 2025.

“We had residents who were just so excited to jump in and were calling their neighbors, figuring out how they could get them a pantry …” she said.

Neighbors also are planning and organizing events. Harris volunteered to lead the Movie Nights at Highlander. Those are free community screenings of films picked by Highlander residents in June and July.

Harris is excited about the prospect of bringing Highlander residents together and building community inside the neighborhood and beyond. So when Highlander leaders asked for a resident to take charge of movie nights, Harris raised her hand.

“I decided to take it on and see if we can get more people to come out, not just the residents, but the public,” she said. “So I’m going to try to really get the word out. I don’t care if I have to like, pin up flyers, or word of mouth, I just want people to come out and have a good time.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/we-deserve-nice-things-highlander-thrives...