The contrast with Omaha

Omaha filed under the same Act. Its Affordable Housing Report 2025, dated June 30, 2025, records that “[i]n March of 2024, the City of Omaha adopted a zoning code amendment that permits Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) by right in nine zoning districts, and permits this housing type in another 12 zoning districts with approval of a Conditional Use Permit (Planning Board approval).”²

It lists five density incentives. It contains no mention of covenants, homeowners associations or private restrictions anywhere.

The same is true of the smaller cities' filings. Bellevue told the Legislature that guest houses not rented or conducted as a business are permitted accessory uses in its agricultural and residential districts.³ Papillion pointed to a municipal code provision permitting a secondary residence in an accessory structure.⁴ Grand Island reported that accessory dwelling units are permitted as a matter of right in all its residential districts subject to density and setback limits.⁵ None of the three contains the words “covenant” or “homeowners association.”

Two cities, one statute, opposite candour — and legislators read both.

What the Lincoln passage actually establishes, and what it does not

It is not a legal holding. A city planning department's view of covenant supremacy is not a court's. Nebraska courts treat restrictive covenants as contracts running with the land, and that is where the rule comes from, not from a report.

It is not new law. Nothing changed when Lincoln wrote this. A zoning code has never authorised what a declaration forbids; the two instruments answer different questions, and the more restrictive one governs the owner's conduct.

What it is, is an admission of the split screen. Lincoln is telling the Legislature that upzoning reaches older neighbourhoods and stops at newer ones, and the line between them is the covenant. That is a distributional fact about who bears density, and it is the kind of fact that eventually produces a bill.

What it means for a Nebraska board

Your declaration is now a policy object. A board whose community has density, floor-area or height covenants should understand those provisions are being discussed at the state level as an obstacle to housing supply. That is not a reason to change them. It is a reason to know exactly what they say.

Expect the pressure to arrive as preemption, and expect it to be drafted around you at first. Every Nebraska housing-supply bill of 2026 explicitly preserved covenants — LB 1041 listed association restrictions as things that could still prohibit an ADU, and LB 1094 carried a full savings clause. All of them died. The next drafter is not bound by those choices.

Read your own community's covenants against the city's new rules. Lincoln broadened its ADU rules by text amendment in March 2026. An owner in a covenanted Lincoln subdivision can now be fully zoning-compliant and in violation of the declaration at the same time, and the board will be the one explaining that.

Comment on the 2027 filing. These reports are assembled by planning staff and they shape how legislators see the problem. An association's factual account of what its covenants do and why is more useful in that document than in a letter after a bill is introduced.

What to watch next

Watch the 2027 cycle for whether other Nebraska cities follow Lincoln's lead in naming covenants. One city saying it is an observation. Several cities saying it, in filings to the committee that handles urban affairs, is the evidentiary base for a preemption bill.