For decades, the stretch of Leavenworth Street running through midtown Omaha was written off as underserved, aging, and difficult. Old storefronts sat vacant. Foot traffic was sparse. The corridor never quite lived up to the energy of nearby neighbourhoods like Blackstone or Dundee. But something has changed — and it’s changing fast. Driven by one of the largest medical campus expansions in the country and a wave of independent business owners who saw opportunity where others saw obstacles, the Leavenworth Street corridor is finally having its moment.
The Engine Behind the Growth: UNMC’s Multibillion-Dollar Expansion
No single force has done more to reshape the Leavenworth Street corridor than the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The university’s Omaha campus — already spanning roughly 10 million square feet — is in the middle of an unprecedented expansion westward across Saddle Creek Road, and the ripple effects along Leavenworth Street are substantial.
At the heart of that expansion is the Catalyst project — a $65 million redevelopment of the former Omaha Steel Castings plant along the new 46th Street extension. The 170,000-square-foot facility houses the 40,000-square-foot UNMC Innovation Hub, bringing together UNeMed and UNeTech — UNMC’s research commercialisation arms — alongside 130,000 square feet of space for biotech and technology startups, plus an event centre, food hall, and market. It’s a live-work-eat district built around medical innovation, and it’s already attracting serious attention from investors and entrepreneurs.
Alongside the Catalyst, UNMC broke ground in October 2023 on the six-story CORE (Campus Operations & Research Excellence) Building at the southwest corner of Saddle Creek Road and Farnam Street — a $105 million structure that will replace the university’s outdated administrative facilities and serve as a research anchor for the expanding west campus. The City of Omaha has committed $30 million for an accompanying parking structure on the west side of Saddle Creek, and a $13.5 million federal Department of Transportation grant is funding two new pedestrian walkways — one over Saddle Creek Road and one over Leavenworth Street itself — dramatically improving connectivity between the campus and the surrounding neighbourhood.
UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey Gold has been candid about the scale of what’s happening: research funding granted to UNMC in the first quarter of 2023 surpassed the same period the prior year by more than 20%, and the university hit record student enrollment for 23 consecutive years. External funding for research, education, and public service reached $250.5 million in fiscal year 2023 alone. All of that activity needs supporting infrastructure — housing, retail, coffee shops, restaurants, pharmacies — and the Leavenworth corridor is positioned directly in its path.
For the full picture of UNMC’s expanding footprint, Nebraska Examiner has been covering the growth in depth.
Independent Businesses Leading the Charge
While UNMC provides the macro engine, it’s the small business owners who are giving the Leavenworth corridor its character — and their optimism is striking.
Jeff Kilborn recently relocated his independent community pharmacy to a corner location on Leavenworth Street, a deliberate bet on the corridor’s trajectory. “Knowing that The Noddle Group was going to develop something to the west, knowing that UNMC is growing to the east, we felt it would be a good opportunity,” Kilborn told WOWT. “We felt it would be a good opportunity for us to continue to be an independent community pharmacy and having a corner presence, which I never had previously.” Customer traffic has been solid, and he’s hoping the surrounding business community continues to build out.
Wendy Pivonka relocated her Legend Comics and Coffee to 31st and Leavenworth and sees the growth clearly. Her concern isn’t whether the corridor will thrive — she’s confident it will — but whether the growth will be managed in a way that keeps the existing residential community intact. “There’s a potential especially with the growth of the med centre just to the west. I definitely see the potential but I would hate for it to impact the residential area around here,” she said.
Steve Basilico has taken an even bigger swing, purchasing a large building near 25th and Leavenworth to launch an antique mall focused on curated goods with traceable histories. “What I want to do is provide space for more curated goods where people know the history of them, and where they came from,” he said, describing his goal as adding the kind of activity that lifts neighbouring businesses too. He’s banking on the same theory as Kilborn — that momentum from Nebraska Medicine to the east and downtown development to the west will continue spreading outward through the corridor.
Leavenworth Pointe: Bringing Back the Commercial DNA
One of the most symbolically significant developments on the corridor is Leavenworth Pointe — a $2.5 million project to rehabilitate three nearly century-old buildings at the southwest corner of 31st and Leavenworth into approximately 11,500 square feet of retail and restaurant space.
The location isn’t random. That corner is the precise spot where Glidden Paints once stood in 1952, when Leavenworth Street was a thriving commercial artery lined with small storefronts, a streetcar line, and neighbourhood merchants. According to a report prepared for the developer by Restoration Omaha, “Leavenworth Street was a vibrant commercial corridor, and many small storefronts were constructed in the neighbourhood in the first three decades of the 20th Century. Many of those historic commercial structures still stand today.”
Leavenworth Pointe is an explicit effort to reconnect the corridor to that legacy — rehabilitating historic bones rather than demolishing them. Developer Heine and his team believe the growing UNMC employee base alone provides a ready customer pool for incoming diners, coffee shops, and service providers. The full project background is covered by the Omaha World-Herald.
Infrastructure Investment Catching Up With the Momentum
Business growth needs infrastructure to sustain it — and public investment in the Leavenworth corridor is finally arriving at scale.
The intersection of Saddle Creek Road and Leavenworth Street, long one of Omaha’s most chaotic traffic bottlenecks, has been the focus of a major City of Omaha reconstruction project. New concrete pavement, redesigned intersections, improved pedestrian crossings, and new sidewalks and medians are all part of a multi-year effort coordinated between the city’s Public Works Department and UNMC. Construction also extended 46th Street south of Farnam Street, creating what will become the main commercial drag through the innovation district.
Two new pedestrian overpasses — one at 39th and Leavenworth and one over Saddle Creek — are designed to make the corridor walkable in a way it never previously was, connecting UNMC’s growing student and employee population directly to the Leavenworth Street business district on foot. New bike lanes, improved lighting, and landscaped vacant lots are also transforming the visual character of streets that were previously uninviting.
“UNMC is excited about the improvements. It’ll make getting into and out of midtown Omaha so much easier,” said Brian Spencer, UNMC’s executive director of campus development and real estate. Full construction update details are available on the UNMC newsroom.
The Housing Piece: Bringing More Residents to the Corridor
A corridor only truly thrives when people live on it — and that piece is moving too. UNMC is planning a $66 million, six-story, 205,000-square-foot student housing complex southeast of 39th Street and Dewey Avenue, designed to house around 300 students, residents, fellows, and postdoctoral professionals. The project addresses a genuine crisis: with roughly 3,400 students based at UNMC’s Omaha campus and a long waiting list for the existing 100 on-campus residences, the housing shortage has been a real constraint on the university’s growth.
Private residential development is also continuing. The Blackstone Business Improvement District — just east of the Leavenworth corridor — is already a thriving entertainment and dining neighbourhood that largely exists because of UNMC’s gravitational pull. Jim Farho, president of the district, has been direct about the relationship: “We’re happy they’re here in the neighbourhood.” The city’s planned streetcar route, set to run from downtown through midtown toward UNMC, is expected to add further momentum to residential and commercial investment along the entire corridor.
Balancing Growth With Community
Not everyone in the corridor is purely celebratory. The construction period has been disruptive for established businesses — Neighber’s Bar owner Josh Bruckner was initially concerned about what the UNMC expansion would mean for his family business, which his mother has owned since 1987. After city officials reached out directly following a news report on his concerns, dialogue improved and the path forward became clearer. But Central Body Collision Repair owner Haffke faces losing the business’s entryway and almost all of its sidewalk to construction, and is being compensated for land taken as part of the project.
Wendy Pivonka’s concern about displacement is widely shared. Long-term residents of the corridor’s surrounding neighbourhoods worry that rising property values, driven by UNMC’s expansion, will eventually price out the community that has called these blocks home for generations. It’s a tension that city planners, UNMC, and neighbourhood associations are actively navigating — with UNMC having made explicit commitments to neighbourhood associations about its development borders.
What’s Coming Next
The near-term pipeline for the Leavenworth corridor is substantial. Beyond the Catalyst and CORE buildings, UNMC’s Project NExT — a nearly $2.2 billion phased expansion covering research, education, clinical care, and community services — has received the green light for its first phase architectural and engineering planning. That project, if fully realised, would expand UNMC’s footprint by roughly 1.5 million additional square feet. The scale of that investment will continue to reshape everything around it, including Leavenworth Street.
For anyone watching Omaha’s urban development story, the Leavenworth Street corridor is one of the most compelling chapters currently being written. The bones were always there — century-old storefronts, walkable blocks, a central location between downtown and midtown. What was missing was investment, infrastructure, and confidence. All three are now arriving together.
For ongoing Omaha development news, Nebraska Examiner and WOWT provide the most detailed local coverage of the corridor’s continued evolution.
