New subdivisions keep popping up along every gravel road and the traffic on Highway 50 gets worse every year. Are we growing into something great, or bulldozing the quiet small-town life people actually moved here for?
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Add your commentMy grandparents farmed the land that's now the Stonebridge Meadows development. I'm not gonna pretend I'm not emotional about that. But they also sold it because farming wasn't sustainable for our family anymore. Growth is complicated and I wish people would stop treating it as purely good or purely bad.
I coached little league here for eleven years. Used to have 6 teams. Now we have 14 and no fields to put them on because every open parcel got developed. The kids are great, the families are great, but the town never built the parks and rec to match. That's the actual tragedy nobody talks about.
Born and raised here, graduated from Parkview in 2003. Springfield used to be the kind of place where you knew every face at the Fourth of July parade. Last year I couldn't find parking anywhere near downtown and half the people around me had no idea what the Cornhusker Days float tradition even was. That's not growth, that's erasure.
I actually looked this up before commenting: Springfield's population was around 1,400 in 2000 and it's now pushing 5,000+. That's not explosive growth, that's borderline catastrophic for a town with one elementary school and a volunteer fire department. Anyone who thinks the infrastructure is keeping pace is not paying attention.
Can someone actually explain to me why Sarpy County keeps approving these subdivisions without requiring developers to pay for the infrastructure? The county just greenlit another 400-unit development off 96th Street and there is ZERO plan for how that traffic feeds onto Highway 50. I've sat in that backup past Gretna on a Friday afternoon and it is genuinely 45 minutes to go four miles. This isn't a lifestyle complaint, it's a planning failure.
To everyone complaining about new neighbors: you do realize most of us moved here because we also wanted the quiet life, right? We're not the enemy. We're just families who got priced out of Bellevue and La Vista and followed the same instinct you did. Direct your frustration at the county board, not the people moving into those houses.
ok so i moved here from omaha like two years ago specifically to get away from the sprawl and now the sprawl followed me here. feels like a cruel joke honestly
The real problem is Springfield has no actual town center anymore. Every new subdivision is designed so residents drive straight to Gretna or Papillion for everything. We're just a bedroom community with a zip code at this point. Any chance of a real Main Street identity died when the county refused mixed-use zoning requests three years in a row.
Hard disagree with the nostalgia crowd. My property taxes have gone down proportionally, the roads are getting paved, and we finally got a decent pizza place that isn't 20 minutes away. Growth isn't the villain here.
That pamphlet take is doing a lot of work up there. Springfield was a quiet agricultural stop, not a would-be rival to Omaha. Let's not rewrite history to feel better about traffic.
Springfield has been growing since the 1990s. People who say it was some perfect frozen-in-time village clearly never tried to get a job here or buy a house before 2010 when there was literally nothing. A little amnesia goes a long way when you're feeling sentimental.
Fun fact, Springfield was actually founded as a major regional hub back in the 1800s and was supposed to rival Omaha for railroad commerce. It never happened obviously but the BONES of a bigger city have always been there. This growth is just finally fulfilling the original vision! (I read this in a Nebraska history pamphlet so it has to be accurate)
lol "ruining" is dramatic. its nebraska. flat land and soybeans were never the whole personality
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