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Let’s be blunt: North Platte must do everything it can to build more housing units.

If we won’t, why pursue a beef plant, a rail park and our city’s other job-creating projects if most of their workers are forced to live and pay property taxes somewhere else?

Tuesday’s City Council meeting, featuring a proposed 51-home north-side modular housing development, will signal just how serious our city is about renewing and growing itself.

It isn’t the first time lately that council members have been asked for city assistance — in the form of, yes, tax increment financing — to help relieve our chronic shortages of single-family homes and apartment units.

It won’t be the last time, either. It can’t be.

Not when this city of nearly 24,000 has a mere 30 to 40 homes for sale, based on recent Lincoln County Board of Realtors figures.

And especially not when we’re expecting a few thousand new jobs in the next few years from Sustainable Beef LLC, the rail park outside Hershey and related businesses.

Every council member voted for Sustainable Beef’s TIF package six months ago. But some locals’ well-honed distaste for TIF — or any kind of public aid to build housing or lure jobs — has reasserted itself since.

We get it. We’ve said that before here.

TIF opponents don’t want to put off the property tax benefits of economic growth, which is what TIF requires of us by temporarily diverting them to offset some (but by no means all) of a developer’s project costs.

Well, local residents who support TIF — or are at least reconciled to it — would rather have those taxes right away, too.

If developers are able and willing to build homes and business buildings without TIF, who among us wouldn’t welcome that?

But that’s the problem.

By and large, developers are saying they cannot make any money building in rural Nebraska without some local help. Especially in housing.

It’s time we trust, just a little bit, that our local business leaders — our neighbors — are telling the truth about that.

We’ve made progress since 2018’s North Platte-Lincoln County housing study said we needed hundreds of new and rehabilitated homes and apartments just to have a healthy number of vacant units for a place this size.

But even our chamber’s successful “Shot in the Arm” incentive program has required regular infusions of state tax dollars alongside contributions from local employers.

Just like every other TIF project, the chamber’s housing proposal at West 17th Street and Adams Avenue wouldn’t take any property tax money out of city coffers.

In fact, by buying city-owned land, the chamber’s project would immediately add to North Platte’s property tax revenues even with TIF. (So will Sustainable Beef, once it closes on its financing and its purchase of an old city sewer lagoon.)

The 51-lot housing project needs a bit more than half of the 23 acres the city has held for North Platte Cemetery expansion. The city still would have the 10 acres closest to the cemetery — land that hasn’t been dedicated, consecrated or added to the cemetery yet.

And the chamber’s project wouldn’t involve low-income housing, as alleged during last week’s Planning Commission hearing.

Modular homes aren’t mobile homes or metal prefabs. They’re built like “stick-built” homes, except they’re assembled elsewhere and moved to their purchaser’s lot, there to be installed on a foundation.

Chamber leaders hope they’ll cost $250,000 or less to buy, though the ever-rising cost of building supplies could raise that figure.

Now consider this fact from Lincoln County Assessor’s Office records and based on 2021 valuations:

Out of 1,705 single-family homes north of the Union Pacific tracks, exactly three had a taxable value of $250,000 or more in 2021.

What was the north side’s most expensive home worth for tax purposes? $251,740.

These modular homes would immediately become the most valuable homes north of the tracks.

And just how many decades overdue is North Platte in seriously investing in its neighborhoods from Seventh Street north?

The City Council should approve this housing project. Its members must be ready to do likewise with similar projects, TIF or no TIF.

Unless we’re content to build a beef plant and a rail park and watch our surrounding counties land those new workers as homeowners.

That can’t be true, can it?

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Let’s imagine that North Platte’s incorporation as a city — which was 150 years ago next year, by the way — had never taken place.

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