“So there's a critical mass, which starts to get the area on a few radar screens,” Noddle says. “Omaha is an emerging market. We've moved from a third tier city to a second tier city and everybody's working hard for Omaha to become a first choice city.”

A common thread with all emerging cities—and one stressed also by Omaha—is that jobs are critical for growth. Similar to other cities, Omaha is looking to tech jobs to attract millennials. Google is building a data center in the Omaha-area. Facebook is expanding its data center in the nearby city of Papillion to 2.6 million square feet. LinkedIn recently revealed plans to move into a 200,000-square-foot facility potentially increasing its workforce to 1,000 by 2021. “Omaha is kind of known as the Silicon Prairie,” says Noddle.

As it's a market that's still emerging, housing is affordable. Noddle says the best apartments for rent are about $2 per square foot a month. To buy a home, the median price per square foot is $145, according to Zillow. The median price of Omaha's currently listed homes is $239,900 while the median price of homes that sold is $183,400.

“People can live here in a really nice house, make a very nice living and be able to put some money away every month,” adds Noddle.

Not everything is perfect. For instance, The Washington Post has reported that Nebraska has a bit of a housing shortage. Although in the state employers are willing to pay more to lure talent, only one in every 184 or so housing units in the state were for sale in any given month, according to Zillow. The paper noted this makes available homes about 1.7 times more scarce than the national average.

1980 N. Milwaukee in Logan Square is within walking distance to Chicago Transit Authority's blue line.

That Hipness Factor

Does Omaha have what it takes to be the next emerging market, similar to what, say Denver or Nashville were 10 years ago? Indeed, trying to determine which city is most likely to be the next Austin or the next Charlotte requires an analysis of many moving parts. Omaha, it would appear, is checking off many of the boxes and could well be added to that list one day. But as experts will tell you, it is more about the numbers, and, in Omaha's case, some elements are still not in place.

Noddle acknowledges that “the community has had a reputation, a stigma if you will, for being a sleepy Midwestern city; that the rug gets rolled up at nine o'clock, and that's just not the case.”

But even that may be subject to change. Although everyone might not know it, Noddle reports there's an exciting music and food scene—He's even working on a food hall with a Brooklyn hospitality group “and they see tremendous opportunities here.”

The issue of stigma or a geography's reputation doesn't just apply to more rural areas or those unfairly imagined as “out in the sticks.”

For certain emerging neighborhoods to be successful they need a “hipness factor that's already bred into the neighborhood,” says Susan Tjarksen, managing director in the Chicago office of Cushman & Wakefield. Similar to some Chicago areas, for example, the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn already had a hip image with a historical, gritty, industrial past. That contrasts to Staten Island, which has a deeply embedded, long, suburban history. Although on the water and close to Manhattan with seemingly desirable real estate lacking the X Factor, that borough will take a much longer time to emerge.

In addition, neighborhoods can get stigmatized by crime. “There are crimes such as gun violence, reported rapes, your house gets broken into on a regular basis,” says Tjarksen. “And then there are crimes like your car gets broken into. You have to differentiate between them.” The graffiti, litter, vandalism, annoyance crimes differ from those that will actually keep people from moving to a neighborhood and will slow down gentrification.

Alan Schactman, director of the residential division of Clayco, a Chicago real estate and construction firm, is involved with two emerging neighborhood projects, both of which have access to public transit. Transit, he says, is critical for a neighborhood to emerge.

One of the projects is 1980 N. Milwaukee in Logan Square, walking distance to Chicago Transit Authority's blue line. The other is 4555 N. Sheridan in Uptown Chicago, right off CTA's red line. “Those are literally the two most active and traveled lines in the city,” he says.

Aksarben Village is part of Omaha's economic growth of the last few years.

The Tipping Point

Schactman defines “emerging” as areas where people want to invest. That can mean multifamily residential properties attracting the younger, single, recent college graduates who want to live in the city, paying rents they can afford. Those tend to be the edgier neighborhoods.

But emerging can also mean where the affordability allows for an uptick in single-family homes, where he sees movement in Chicago's Uptown.

Tjarksen specifies what signals the “tipping point” for gentrification: “When you see the number of bachelor's degrees climb in a submarket that's one indication. The second indication is home ownership. People who are buying two flats and converting them to single-family homes or renovating them and living there as well, and renting out the upstairs.”

She says an emerging neighborhood's timeline generally starts 10 years before the tipping point, and then takes another 10 years for the market to reach maturity.

Although people describe gentrification as making areas more livable, downsides can include what Jane Jacobs describes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The neighborhoods can become the victim of their own success, getting too popular, pushing up the rents so high that the quirky independent shops can no longer afford to stay. Chain stores fill the area and long-term residents get pushed out by the higher rents and cost of living.

“That's a tough one,” says Clayco's Schactman. He notes some developers are “really trying to retain as much authenticity of the neighborhood as possible.” However, with candor he says, “But I don't know a developer anywhere in Chicago that performs less than $30 or $35 [per square foot] on retail rents which a Mom and Pop probably isn't going to be able to do.”

He says, “There's a real push pull between gentrification and affordable housing. There may be elderly people who have lived in areas for 30, 40 years and may not be able to afford to live there,” when neighborhoods change. But with the high costs of construction he adds, “Unless we get subsidies from various groups, we can't build workforce housing.”

Tjarksen adds, “Every developer in the city believes that inclusionary housing is important to the stability of neighborhoods and that workforce housing in place needs to be maintained.” However, whether that gets delivered through rent control or affordable housing ordinances is still up for discussion.

She states mandates for rent control or affordable housing can have unintended consequences of making the cost of building no longer penciling out, which will result in less construction. She cites a Cushman & Wakefield report finding inclusionary housing is predicated on the continued development of market-rate housing.