Booming development along Yankee Hill Road creates need for new schools

It still feels like countryside if you’re gazing to the south, beyond the school construction to the Cheney water tower in the distance.

Yankee Hill Road is still gravel and it winds around the school site, over railroad tracks to the small village and the cornfields beyond.

But look west and what’s happening begins to become clear: This is one of the hot spots of Lincoln development, the colored parts of the city’s comprehensive plan map coming to life.

“The development is really exploding out here, and with the new schools, the YMCA and Jensen Park, that’s likely to continue,” said Kris Humphrey, city public works interim design and construction manager.

Within a few years, there will be less and less country and more and more neighborhoods, some commercial development and plenty of small bodies to fill a couple of schools.

Some numbers to back that up: The city has issued 1,605 building permits in the area since 2011 -- 333 of them last year. Those permits include both finished and unfinished construction -- 882 single-family homes, 552 apartments, 167 town homes and four duplexes.

They are in an area bounded roughly by 56th Street and Pine Lake Road to the north and west and the comprehensive plan to the east and south. That line follows 98th Street and tapers to just south of Saltillo Road.

Those numbers are among the things Lincoln Public Schools officials considered when deciding where to build new schools. They worried about spots in north Lincoln, too -- especially to the northeast and east where subdivisions are cropping up in the once taboo Stevens Creek watershed.

But they also needed to relieve significant overcrowding at Lux Middle School, 7800 High St., and deal with the fact that the district’s newest elementary -- Kloefkorn near 98th Street and Pine Lake Road -- already is at capacity.

There is a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship between developers, city planners and school officials. The latter pay close attention to what city planners and developers are doing and LPS officials buy land in areas they suspect will develop. Likewise, schools draw homeowners.

Scott Wieskamp, LPS director of facilities and maintenance, is in regular contact with city planners, and maps of the latest comprehensive plan share wall space with plots of LPS boundaries and attendance areas.

“It’s a tool,” Wieskamp said. “That’s why those maps stay up all the time.”

Bottom line: The activity going on along Yankee Hill Road from 56th to 84th streets and to the south convinced school officials that’s where they should spend millions in bond proceeds to build a middle school and an elementary.

And that, in turn, may be pushing development. It's true that LPS bought the land where Wysong Elementary will open this fall along Blanchard Boulevard, near 63rd and Yankee Hill, years earlier because it foresaw growth there. But there were still more vacant lots than houses when officials decided to build there.

By the time LPS officials held an official groundbreaking, a full-blown neighborhood had sprung up.

Drive along Blanchard, past the school and you’ll pass through several other, slightly older developments including Village Gardens and Village Meadows. To the southeast is a quickly developing subdivision known as Woodlands at Yankee Hill.

While Wysong is now in the middle of a neighborhood, Moore Middle School -- along with the YMCA that will be attached -- sits on the edge of much of the development. That was a concern to some board members initially.

But among the factors that helped convince the district 84th and Yankee Hill was the right location is a project by a group called the Rokeby Coalition.

The city recently approved the developers' plans that could mean turning farm fields along Rokeby Roads between 70th and 84th into more than 1,000 new residential units within the next decade, said City-County Planning Director David Cary.

“If you start adding all those areas up you start seeing why those new schools are needed,” he said.

New schools aren’t the only projects going on in the area. City public works has a $16.9 million project to pave Yankee Hill Road -- and build roundabouts -- from 70th Street to Nebraska 2, Humphrey said.

There also are plans to widen Pine Lake Road from 61st Street to Nebraska 2.

Moore is being built on a corner of the Jensen Park land, where the city hopes to eventually build baseball and soccer fields.

The northwest and southeast corners of 70th and Yankee Hill Road are slated for future commercial development, Cary said, and there’s a water main project along Yankee Hill Road from 56th and 84th streets.

The city also has plans to build a park in Big Thompson Creek -- the area where Wysong is being built, and to extend bike trails in the area.

“The good news is we’ve come out of the recession and we’re back to building significant amounts of residential, and commercial, for that matter,” Carey said.

He likens the development along the eastern portion of Yankee Hill Road to the boom in the southwestern edge of the city some years ago.

“It is one of the main emerging areas where active growth is occurring,” he said.