A new purpose for Azalealand finally takes root: Affordable housing

"Our neighbors, after my husband had died, have been so wonderful," said Unger, a retired teacher who lives in the Prescott Area neighborhood in southeast Lincoln.

A few blocks away, Mary Kay Wood helps her neighbors by walking their kids, who are 5 and 8 years old, to school one day a week.

"I just adore them," said Wood, a great-grandmother who still practices as a clinical social worker and has lived in the area since 1989. "And they come over, and I have a water cooler thing in my house. So they come in to get water all the time, ride their little bikes. It's energizing to have children in the neighborhood."

Now, Unger, Wood and the rest of their neighborhood are preparing to welcome new families to their tight-knit part of town: NeighborWorks Lincoln is planning to develop the well-known 3-acre property near South 36th Street and Prescott Avenue — once home to Azalealand — into affordable housing. 

Today, the only thing that remains of the former nursery and flower shop is an old Azalealand sign on what is otherwise vacant land.

Only time will tell how well the development integrates with the greater neighborhood — whether the relationship between the two will be strong like the bonds between Unger and her next-door neighbor, or Wood and her friends across the street.

"I've been hesitant and didn't want anything to ruin the serenity of our little neighborhood," Wood said. "But I have a granddaughter that can't financially get into a house, and I'm hoping that at some point maybe this will be a route for them, this kind of opportunity."

'New opportunities' 

Azalealand closed in 2010 and the property — a 1-acre greenhouse, a house, a sprawling business building — fell into disarray before getting torn down in 2019.

NeighborWorks bought the property in the fall of 2023 and wants to build 18 affordable homes for first-time homebuyers and two additional, market-rate homes.

"We hope to turn a place for families to come and get their boutonnieres to what was currently vacant land into a place where families now live and create new memories together," Dillon Murman, with NeighborWorks, said during a City Council hearing on the project earlier this summer. "This development really aligns with our values and our goal as an affordable housing developer to create new opportunities for families to reach homeownership and start new lives."

Murman added the project aligns with city goals to add more affordable housing, especially because the project is an "infill development" — a project within a built-up urban area near existing utilities and other infrastructure, rather than an edge-of-town project in an area lacking extensive infrastructure.

The former Azalealand site is a weirdly shaped property — essentially three rectangular lots of different sizes stacked together — almost completely surrounded by 22 single-family homes.

The two market-value homes will be built facing Prescott Avenue, while to the south will be eight townhomes, 10 rowhomes with internal courtyards and a shared green space.

NeighborWorks' plan is to build a road connecting the homes to Prescott and Lowell avenues. Parking will be available in attached garages and individual driveways accessible through the roadway.

Charlie Wesche, NeighborWorks' chief executive, said during a Lincoln-Lancaster County Planning Commission hearing that he likes to refer to the shared green space as "the biggest front yard in all of Lincoln."

The townhomes and the rowhomes will have front porches facing the green space, which may have a gazebo. The green space will also contain a water retention area to take care of runoff issues known to plague the site.

"It's just temporary holdback during a big storm event," Wesche said. "That water will subside, and essentially 95% of the time, this is just green space that kids can use to play soccer."

The City Council unanimously approved a zoning change necessary for the project in late June.

Murman said NeighborWorks would like to break ground in 2027, with the bulk of construction taking place in 2028 and some units being completed in 2029.

Azalealand is born

By the time of America's entry into World War II, a nursery and flower shop had existed on the site for decades. It was called Chapin Bros. Florists and, later, Danielson Floral.

In the 1940s, the site was on the edge of the city of Lincoln. There were cornfields nearby.

Meanwhile, out west, the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted Masami and Haruye Utsumi to flee the West Coast, where they had a nursery. Masami emigrated from Japan to California, where he met Haruye and married her in 1937.

"After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and because of the Utsumis' Japanese heritage, the United States government gave the family a choice: transfer to an internment camp or move to the Midwest," said a 2022 obituary for the couple's son, Tosh Utsumi.

The Utsumis moved to Omaha before settling in Lincoln in January 1946 and buying the nursery and flower shop, rebranding it "Azalealand."

Within a couple of decades, Azalealand was surrounded by the city — bordered on four sides by brick ranches, split-levels and tree-lined streets.

For decades, that wasn't a problem. As the city grew, so did Azalealand, adding a fleet of delivery vans and a greenhouse big enough to cover and nurture a full acre of plants and flowers.

Born in Omaha in 1942, Tosh Utsumi went to Doane University, earning a degree in theoretical mathematics in 1965. At the university, he was a member of the Alpha Omega fraternity, student congress and the Doane Tiger yearbook as a photographer.

After college, he started working at Azalealand full time. By the time Masami Utsumi died in 1985, Tosh had been part of the family business for a quarter-century.

"(My parents) had nowhere to go. They came inland. There was no family, no friends, nothing," Utsumi told the Journal Star in 2018. "They just started a little business and it kept getting bigger and bigger."

'Nothing I could do'

Tosh Utsumi closed Azalealand in 2010, the same year he and his wife were diagnosed with cancer.

He lost his wife, he took years to recover from his own illness and he cared for his mother until she died in 2012. The sprawling Azalealand property got away from him.

"There was nothing I could do," Utsumi said in 2018. "There was no one to take it over."

Neighbors grew frustrated by the urban jungle in their backyards, a problem only they could see.

By 2018, the abandoned buildings and wild, 3-acre habitat became what health inspectors called an attractive nuisance — a magnet for vandals and animals. The property became a popular hangout for foxes, turkeys, muskrats and possums. 

The shop's basement contained about a pickup load of agricultural chemicals — pesticides and herbicides — that required special disposal. Also on the to-do list was dealing with asbestos and underground fuel tanks, as well as any contaminated soil.

"It was a mess, and it's been like that for a long time," Mark Ruhl, who used to own a house that backed up to Azalealand's northwest corner, told the Journal Star in 2018. "Kids were going back there and breaking the windows in the greenhouses. We'd hear it at night."

Despite the removal of the big greenhouse in 2017, the property still included a debris field of discarded greenhouse fans and rusting vans as well as a structurally unsound former store stocked with unsold flower pots.

City officials were on the verge of coming in and taking care of Azalealand themselves, which was expected to cost more than $100,000.

The city could bill Utsumi for the work. If he didn't pay, the city could place a lien on the property, foreclose and sell the land to recover its costs.

But the city didn't want to take that action against Utsumi.

"He is a very honorable gentleman; he is very pleasant to deal with," Chris Connolly, assistant city attorney, said at the time. "But he makes promises that aren't kept, and that’s a problem for us."

By February 2019, Utsumi had made enough progress on cleaning up the property to keep the city from coming in.

He died in January 2022 at the age of 79. An obituary for Utsumi's wife, Lynn, did not list any surviving children between the couple. Utsumi's only sibling, Takeo Utsumi, of Grand Island, died in the fall of 2022 at the age of 84.

Housing plans take root

County property records show Utsumi's estate sold the former Azalealand property to a company called FEN-SCH LLC in March 2023 for $800,000.

Wood, the neighbor with the water cooler, said the company held a meeting in the neighborhood to discuss its plan to build expensive, single-family homes on the property.

Neighbors with a slew of concerns — from how the project would change the character of a quiet neighborhood to how the developers were going to address the known flooding problems — showed up to the meeting in droves, Wood said.

"It didn't feel that they really were interested in the neighborhood itself — that they were interested in making a profit and getting out," Wood said.

FEN-SCH LLC did not go through with its plans and sold the property to affordable housing nonprofit NeighborWorks for $1.3 million in September 2024.

Even before the purchase was final, NeighborWorks hosted a neighborhood meeting outlining its mission and recruited a nine-member resident advisory board to help craft plans for the site. The board met three times and worked with Peace Studio Architects, which developed NeighborWorks' site plan.

Wesche said the board influenced plans in two major ways: They advocated for roads entering the development from the north and the south, instead of only one direction, and they pushed for a perimeter roadway around the affordable homes to make room for the green space.

Wood and Unger, the retired teacher, served on the board, along with Emily Goans, who has lived near Rousseau Elementary School for eight years and has a 4-year-old son.

Now a professional architect with a background in community planning, Goans grew up south of the former Azalealand site and used to ride her bike across Nebraska Parkway to attend Rousseau.

"Peace Studio Architects, I think, did a really good job of responding to (neighbors' concerns) in a way that is still sensitive to planning strategies that don't cause gentrification," Goans said.

Giving others a 'chance'

Residing on Lowell Avenue across the street from Azalealand since the late ’80s, Wood says she lives in a Goldilocks zone — not too far from or too close to the spots around town that matter.

Wood said she always felt "this little connection" to the nursery and flower shop because her great-niece bought her a Norfolk Island pine from Azalealand that started out small but then got way too big for her house.

After the property fell into disarray and became overgrown, it evoked a lot of mystery and stimulated the imaginations of many neighbors, especially children, Wood said.

A large sign at the front of the property with the word "Azalealand" in a cursive script, which neighbors want retained as part of the new development, added to the allure.

"With kids and grandkids, it was like the mystery land over there," Wood said. "We didn't go into it. The sign was always there."

While Wood dreamed that the property would become a park with a playground, she is supportive of NeighborWorks' mission.

She said when she bought her first house, her in-laws helped out with the down payment. Wood is glad organizations like NeighborWorks exist to give people the kind of support she received from her in-laws.

Wood, who lives next to a men's sober-living home, is used to welcoming folks to the neighborhood who might not be wanted universally.

"I'm excited for the people that are going to have a first chance to get a home, just like I'm excited for the guys who are getting a chance to make it sober living next door to me," Wood said.

Unger, who has lived in the Prescott Area neighborhood for 11 years, remembers going to Azalealand more than a half-century ago to pick up boutonnieres for a Lincoln High prom at Antelope Park's pavilion.

If she would have had her druthers, like Wood, Unger would have made the property into a park.

But Unger sees a lot of herself in the people who would benefit directly from the NeighborWorks development, after 42 years of making a teacher's salary and considering the skyrocketing cost of housing today.

And she's in favor of the project because she believes giving people a helping hand is the right thing to do.

"Call me a crazy liberal, but that's how I think," Unger said.