In 2002 I went to work at the Rorick, an eleven-story apartment building at 22nd and St. Mary’s in downtown Omaha. Today it is called City View. It has been empty for a year, and on August 24 the city put it at the top of a list. Here is the public record, plus the summary I was handed that got three things wrong.
Most posts here are about somebody else’s record. This one starts with mine, because I was standing inside the building. That makes me a witness, and it doesn’t make me a source. So everything below that isn’t my own memory links to somebody else’s published record, and the parts I couldn’t confirm are labeled that way.
I came to Omaha from Lynwood, California (90262) in 2001. In 2002 I started work at the Rorick, 604 South 22nd Street. One thing I remember from that year is a lot of new neighbors arriving at once from the downtown YMCA.
I didn’t want to lean on my memory alone, so I checked it. A local history write-up of the building says that after the downtown YMCA closed its residential program in 2002, many of its single and low-income residents moved to the Rorick (Omaha Exploration, 2025-08-05). The year matches mine. It’s still one secondary source, and it says so.
This is the “downtown building” from the story on the front page, the one with the radiator the paperwork swore was fixed.
I left after about a year and a half to get my real estate license. That part is a longer story, and I’m saving it for somewhere other than a civics site.
On 2026-08-24, Omaha officials named the first four projects funded by the Urban Core Housing Fund. The fund holds $40 million in bonds from the city’s streetcar project, bought by the Lozier Foundation and repaid once the streetcar is running. A nonprofit, Front Porch Investments, manages it. The stated goal is nearly 1,900 affordable and workforce homes (Nebraska Public Media, 2026-08-24).
| Project | Developer | Homes | Loan | Who it’s for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| City View, 604 S. 22nd St. | Smith & Henzy Affordable Group | 225 | $3,000,000* | not stated in the source |
| 24th & Dodge | GreenSlate Development Partners | 186 | $964,084 | 178 at ≤100% of area median income; 159 of those at ≤80% |
| 1053 Park Ave. | Foundations Development | 50 (senior) | $1,500,000 | 5 under 40% AMI, 22 at 50%, 23 under 60% |
| 111 N. 38th St. (built 1941) | Gold Coast Partners, LLC | 5 | $475,000 | not stated in the source |
| Total | 466 | $5,939,084 |
*The City View number is my own subtraction, not a number anyone published. The article gives the combined total and three of the four loans. $5,939,084 − $964,084 − $1,500,000 − $475,000 = $3,000,000. The arithmetic is exact, but a derived number isn’t a stated one. If the city or Front Porch publishes the figure directly, that replaces this line.
Ernest C. Rorick files articles of incorporation. Financed with a roughly $2 million FHA loan. Secondary source; see the next section for the claim I can’t settle.
Opens: 11 stories, 235 apartments.
The building houses radio stations, with a transmission tower on the roof. The tower is damaged by storms and removed after 1980.
The downtown YMCA ends its residential program and many of its residents move in. I start work there the same year.
A condominium conversion is attempted and fails.
Renamed City View Apartments, under Miami-based Tzadik Management.
Closed following health and safety concerns, and residents have to leave (WOWT, 2026-08-24).
Named first of four Urban Core Housing Fund projects, 225 homes, Smith & Henzy Affordable Group.
1950–2011 entries come from Omaha Exploration, which cites Omaha World-Herald archives. That’s a local history blog, not a county record, and it gets upgraded the day I pull the deeds.
I first heard about this from an AI summary of a TV news segment. It was quick, confident, and mostly right. “Mostly” isn’t good enough to publish, so here’s the scoreboard.
| The summary said | The record says | |
|---|---|---|
| City View: 225 units, vacant, residents displaced last year | 225 units; closed August 2025 | MATCHES |
| ~95% of 24th & Dodge capped at 100% AMI | 178 of 186 = 95.7% | MATCHES |
| 38th Street: 5 units | 5 units, 111 N. 38th St. | MATCHES |
| “Slate Development Partners” | GreenSlate Development Partners | WRONG NAME |
| “Nearly 2,000” homes | “Nearly 1,900” | ROUNDED UP |
| 100% AMI = $114,000 for a family of four | Not in either article I read | NOT CONFIRMED |
| “The largest loan granted, to date, in Omaha’s history” (the Rorick, 1950) | The history source says “largest single-structure permit filed in Omaha since 1928.” A loan and a permit aren’t the same thing. | TWO VERSIONS |
None of these are scandals, and that’s the reason to list them. A developer’s name is how you find their filings. An AMI dollar figure is how a family finds out whether they qualify. If you get a small fact wrong, the person who acts on it pays for it.
Each of these is a public record or a question to a public office, and I’ll ask them the same way I ask everyone: in writing, with a date, and whatever comes back gets published.
In 2002 I watched people with nowhere else to go move into that building. In 2025 the people living there had to move out. In 2026 the city put $3 million of public-partnership money into bringing it back. I didn’t know any of that history while I worked there. I just worked there.
Would you believe me if I told you the building I started at in Omaha is now line one on the city’s housing list? You don’t have to take my word for it. Everything above has a link, and the links are how you catch me if I got something wrong.