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Byron Nuclear Generating Station by Eric Allix Rogers
Cows graze with Byron Nuclear Generating Station in the background. Photo by Eric Allix Rogers

Comparing Illinois and Netherlands agriculture sectors

April 20, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The Netherlands has about 5 million more people than Illinois, yet fits into a fraction of the land area. Both places take agriculture seriously. So how do they compare?

I started pulling numbers in August 2022 (which I posted in a Twitter thread) and the gap was striking. Illinois agriculture generates more than $19 billion annually in commodities. The Netherlands’ agricultural sector is worth roughly $106 billion — more than five times as much, from a country smaller than West Virginia.

Grazing pasture near Gouda
A grazing pasture near Gouda, Netherlands

Illinois is no slouch

To be fair to Illinois, the state punches well above its weight in food production and processing:

  • Illinois ranks third nationally in the export of agricultural commodities, shipping $8.2 billion worth of goods to other countries.
  • With 2,640 food manufacturing companies, Illinois ranks first in the nation in processed food sales — $180 billion worth.

That $180 billion processed food figure matters. Illinois doesn’t just grow crops; it turns them into products. That’s a different and more lucrative part of the supply chain.

The Dutch numbers need an asterisk

When I first posted that the Netherlands exports $106 billion in agriculture, I had to walk it back. The Dutch import and then re-export enormous quantities of goods — Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest ports, and the Netherlands functions partly as a distribution hub for Europe. Accounting for that, their domestic origin agricultural exports are closer to $77 billion. Still more than nine times Illinois’ export figure.

The Washington Post explained how: the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world by value, behind only the United States — a country with 20 times the land area. The Dutch achieve this through intensive greenhouse agriculture, precision farming, and a relentless focus on yield per square meter. (And apparently, feeding discarded stroopwafels to pigs and chickens.)

Agricultural universities: world-class programs on both sides

The agricultural excellence of both regions is reflected in their universities. Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands holds the top global ranking from QS, and has been named the world’s most sustainable campus for nine consecutive years (it’s 12-mile bike ride west of Arnhem). Its research focuses on food systems, climate resilience, and sustainable farming—precisely the disciplines that underpin the Netherlands’ intensive, high-yield agricultural model.

In Illinois, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) ranks among the nation’s top programs in crop sciences and agricultural engineering. UIUC is home to the Morrow Plots, established in 1876 as the oldest continuous agronomic research site in the United States, and its researchers drive advances in plant genetics and biotechnology that benefit Midwest grain production. That both regions produce top-ranked agricultural universities is no coincidence: world-class farming and world-class research reinforce each other.

The cost of intensity: a manure crisis

The Netherlands’ agricultural output is so intensive that waste manure now exceeds the country’s own environmental standards. The national government has been working out how to actively contract the agriculture industry to bring nitrogen emissions under control. The productivity that made Dutch farming famous is now colliding with environmental limits in a country that has almost no room to absorb the runoff.

That tension doesn’t resolve the admiration for what Dutch farmers have built, but it’s an important caveat to any “why can’t we farm like the Dutch” argument.

Dutch expertise travels

Despite the domestic pressures, Dutch agricultural knowledge is in demand globally. In January 2023, Dutch farming firms brought their expertise to Kentucky.

By May 2023, Rotterdam had opened a floating cattle farm — a multi-story farm built on a barge in the harbor, producing milk within the city. You can tour Floating Farm.

From farmland to transit: the same underlying lesson

By early 2024 the thread had drifted from agriculture to land use and transit. The same constraint that pushes Dutch farmers into vertical greenhouses and floating barns shapes how the Dutch build cities and move people.

In May 2022, CTA and Metra together provided 315,481 rail rides per day. The Dutch national railway (“NS”) carried over 1,000,000 per day. The raw gap is about 3.2x, but the Netherlands has 2.1x more people than the seven-county Chicago metro region, so on a per-capita basis NS carries about 1.5x more rides per resident per day than CTA and Metra combined — and that’s before counting Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and The Hague’s separate tram and metro systems.

In February 2024, NS announced its 2025 timetable. One change stood out: they were going to increase service to every 10 minutes between The Hague, Rotterdam, and Dordrecht. To put that in Chicago terms, it would be like Metra running through-trains from Hyde Park to Highland Park every 10 minutes because it takes about two hours today, with frequencies every 1-2 hours (We should #BuildTheTunnel.)

The travel time comparison makes it even starker. The Hague to Dordrecht via Rotterdam takes a fraction of the time it takes to travel a comparable corridor in the Chicago region — not because the trains are faster, but because the network is integrated, the frequency is high, and stations are where people actually want to go.

What connects all of this

The Netherlands has spent decades — centuries, really — solving the problem of doing more with less space. In agriculture, that means precision, intensity, and now painful reckoning with environmental limits. In cities and transit, it means integrated networks, high frequency, and land use patterns that make transit work.

Reflection on volunteering for Drake Warren’s campaign

March 16, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Updated March 20: Drake won the race on Tuesday and is now the Democratic nominee in November, where he does not currently face a challenger. He gave the following statement to the Chicago Tribune:

“This campaign was shaped by the hands of hundreds of people who made our victory possible,” Warren said in an emailed statement. “I will strive to honor their work and to be a public servant worthy of those I have the privilege to serve.”

As of today I’ve volunteered for Drake Warren’s campaign for Cook County Commissioner of District 10 for twenty hours. That’s six shifts, and six wildly different weather patterns that changed day-to-day and hour-to-hour.

In such a short time I’ve talked to so many Chicagoans. Chicagoans who are voting for Drake, might vote for Drake, and people who can’t or won’t vote. It’s been fun, eye opening, and challenging to try and find ways to connect with so many different people as they walk to or from the grocery store or gym. I did poll greeting at Truman College several times and it’s pretty easy to pick up on people’s habits and figure out which people are headed to cosmetology, to Aldi, or to vote. (I live in a different neighborhood where my neighbors have another set of destinations and patterns.)

I’m supporting Drake because he wants to do the job full time, depends on transit and understands the link between the Board of Commissioners and the CTA, rents his home and, like most renters, has experienced the painful rent increases driven by our housing shortage firsthand. Plus he has clear policy priorities and plans for the future of the office and the Board. I also support his candidacy because his vision for housing affordability is authentic and realistic. He and I are, after all, members of Abundant Housing Illinois alongside whom we’ve spent a lot of time demanding that electeds allow for more housing options to lessen the devastating impacts of a housing shortage — displacement, homelessness, and low quality home environments. 

I haven’t encountered someone who was going to vote for the incumbent, Bridget Gainer, and I wish I could say my sample size is a reliable indicator of what the results will be on Tuesday. But I’m not taking any chances. After I publish this, I’m planning to get back out there for eight more hours on March 17, Election Day. 

People have noticed Drake’s dedication. They’ve seen him at Broadway Armory daily as they commute past him. They’ve appreciated hearing his policy to stop vacant land tax breaks as he stands in the January cold outside their door. And remarked how well he communicates his proposals about the issues Cook County is required to tackle and how it can do better – in person and in various interviews. The juxtaposition between Drake’s and the incumbent’s campaigns has been conspicuous to many folks. This was the case before the news came out showing Gainer had the second worst attendance record for board and committee meetings. Based on some of my conversations during greeting I think that has caused some voters to seek an alternative. 

I’ve asked many of my friends to join me at the early voting locations (a few have heeded the call), or watch and repost one of his videos, or simply read the engaging interview with him in Windy City Times. It was amusing to get a couple of texts from people saying, “I saw your friend when I dropped off my ballot at Broadway Armory.” Drake has been greeting people at that early voting location for two weeks.

First week of Ward Early Voting was a tremendous success thanks to our volunteers and supporters. There is just over *ONE WEEK* left until the March 17th Democratic Primary. Make your plan to vote!

— Drake Warren for Cook County Commissioner (@drakefor10.bsky.social) 2026-03-09T14:37:43.374Z

A community of advocates for more housing, clean energy, and safe transportation has sprung up to support Drake. I feel invigorated being part of this local movement to elect someone who can meet the moment and better represent my friends and other district residents (including my sister and mother).

I’ll be out there tomorrow, on Election Day.

Please vote or drop off your ballot at a secure drop box!

Chicago crash data updated to show monetary damages based on a person’s situation in the crash

February 27, 2026 / / 0 Comments

The Chicago Crashes page that is hosted on Chicago Cityscape shows weekly and year-to-date crash statistics along with estimated costs of those crashes, broken down by person type. Today I published a major change to present the stats better, in a way that matches the costs of the crash that are said to be different based on the person’s situation – whether they were a pedestrian, bicyclists, or motor vehicle occupant – in the crash. Prior to this change, every person in the crash was assigned the same monetary cost as “driver” even if they were a pedestrian or bicyclist.

Improved cost tables

The “Costs of these crashes” tables have two improvements.

  • Each injury-severity column now shows a count alongside the dollar figure, so you can see exactly how many people of each type were killed, had incapacitating injuries, or had non-incapacitating injuries for the selected time period. This makes it easier to verify the numbers and understand the scale behind the cost estimates.
  • The tables previously listed three person-type rows: Driver/Passenger, Pedestrian, and Bicycle. The CPD dataset actually includes six person types. The two remaining types — non-motor vehicle occupants and non-contact vehicle occupants — were being silently folded into the Driver/Passenger row. They now appear in their own “Other” row.

What’s interesting is the differences in value. Pedestrian is “worth” less than bicyclist. Cost estimates use values from the CDC’s WISQARS Cost of Injury study and vary by injury severity and person type.

  • A pedestrian who is killed is said to result in $14,169 in medical costs and $10,500,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,514,169
  • A bicyclist who is killed is said to result in $19,750 in medical costs and $10,800,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,819,750
  • A motor vehicle occupant who is killed is said to result in $11,556 in medical costs and $10,600,000 in non-medical costs, totaling $10,611,556

I haven’t figured out why the pedestrian has a lower non-medical cost.

A note on count differences

You may notice that the injury counts in the “Costs of these crashes” table differ slightly from the totals in the “killed or injured” summary above it. This is expected and I will try to reconcile them 1:1 soon. The two figures come from two Chicago Police Department datasets and may be modified at certain times in ways that my import system does not catch. They differ by a small number of records at any given time.

Crash data is sourced from the Traffic Crashes — Crashes and Traffic Crashes — People datasets on the Chicago Data Portal.

Final Cut Pro for iPad screenshot showing my edit of Governor Pritzker's speech about housing.

A Claude Code skill to find relevant parts of someone’s speech in a video

February 23, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Political speeches, candidate interviews, and public hearings contain dozens of quotable moments — but finding them means scrubbing through hours of video. I created a Claude Code skill that helps me speed up the process of finding the right section of a speech.

The skill, called speech-clip-extractor, takes a video file and a set of topics you care about, then returns a table of timestamps, quotes, and reasons each moment is worth clipping. From there, it extracts the clips using ffmpeg.

Transcription with mlx-whisper

The first step is generating a subtitle file. I used mlx-whisper, Apple’s port of OpenAI Whisper optimized for Apple Silicon. Running on the Neural Engine instead of the CPU, it transcribes a 60-minute video in a few minutes rather than the better part of an hour. One gotcha: mlx-whisper only installs on arm64 Python. If you’re running Anaconda, which ships as x86_64 under Rosetta, the install will silently fail. The fix is to use Homebrew’s Python instead.

I’ve since added speaker diarization to the skill using pyannote.audio. When enabled, each line in the transcript gets a [SPEAKER_00]: label so you can immediately distinguish who is talking. I found this very helpful when reviewing the discussions in multi-person settings like city council committee hearings, where aldermen, commissioners, and witnesses take turns speaking and a plain transcript quickly becomes hard to follow.

Finding the highlights

Once Claude Code has the VTT transcript, it reads the full text and looks for moments that match the topics I specified. For a recent recorded interview with a Cook County Commissioner candidate, I asked it to find moments about property taxes, vacant land, housing, and the Cook County Land Bank. Claude returned a table of eight clips with timestamps, direct quotes, and a one-line note on why each moment was notable — things like “specific stat, strong soundbite” or “names names, calls out a specific corrupt dynamic.”

I also used this skill to locate specific timestamps in Governor Pritzker’s speech from his budget address last week, to locate the parts about housing that I had heard live as he was speaking. It allowed me to quickly pull out clips to show the part when he said “everything is just too damned expensive” and when he talked about parking reform.

I’ve also used it extensively to take notes on very long public hearings — the kind that run three or four hours and cover dozens of agenda items. Rather than rewatching the whole thing, I run the transcript through the skill with a set of topics I care about, and it surfaces the relevant exchanges with timestamps. It’s become my go-to way to extract usable notes from Chicago City Council committee hearings and Illinois legislative testimony.

Cutting the clips

The skill uses ffmpeg to extract each clip and optionally concatenate them into a single video. Even if you don’t use the step of extracting each clip having the timestamps can be immensely helpful to guide you to the right spot in a long video file.

For vertical social media cuts, it applies a 9:16 center crop. When there are two speakers in the frame, it switches the crop to follow whoever is talking — cutting to the left side of the frame when the interviewer speaks and the right when the candidate answers. However, in my experience so far the crop is poorly done so I created my own crop. (I use Final Cut Pro for iPad, which can also do subject tracking within a clip.)

The whole workflow — transcription, analysis, extraction — takes about ten minutes for a one-hour video. What used to require scrubbing through footage manually is now a matter of describing what you’re looking for and letting the model find it.

Okay, 2026 should be the year Illinois lawmakers do something about the housing shortage

February 19, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Governor JB Pritzker announced his plan to address the state’s housing shortage in 2026. This is the third year in a row I’ve written about proposed legislation to unlock new housing in Illinois, and this should be the year – the governor and General Assembly leadership are fully aligned since they, together, introduced bills cover six major land use, zoning, and housing development reforms.

Pritzker’s budget address on Wednesday covered a wide range of housing issues in four minutes:

  • the size of the shortage (227,000 new homes are needed by 2030 to keep up with demand)
  • everything is too damned expensive! rent is too high!
  • not enough homes are being built
  • redlining played a role in housing being built less often in certain areas
  • regulations inhibit new homes and small homes from getting built
  • bureaucratic red tape
  • parking mandates require too much parking that are unused and expensive

Watch the full 4-minute housing speech, part of his hourlong budget address.

I propose some non-exhaustive reasons why the average Illinoisan might want to support these reforms:

  • There are 6% year-over-year rent increases which is making it hard for Illinois to be a competitive place to maintain its population and its services. Population loss results in higher costs for everyone because services and pensions are paid for by fewer people.
  • I want Illinois to lose as few Congressional seats as possible in 2030.
  • It encourages new development which spreads the tax burden onto more taxpayers and lowers it for any given taxpayer.

Ask your legislator to support the BUILD plan by sending them a letter. All you have to do is enter your address and the modify the subject line.

It’s a whole set of reforms to lower housing costs

To resolve these issues, Gov. Pritzker is working with legislative leaders in the Illinois House and Illinois Senate to adopt a package of bills:

Third Party Review (SB 4063, Ellman)

In cases where a municipality cannot review a building permit quickly enough an applicant could hire a third-party reviewer. The municipality would have to complete its initial plan review within 15 business days for a one or two-family house, and within 30 business days for “any multifamily, mixed-use, or commercial project”. Each subsequent review cycle would need to be completed within 10 business days.

Additionally, the bill would set inspection standards, specifically requiring a municipality to perform inspections within two business days of the request. Applicants could also use third-party inspector if the municipality does not meet the standard. Municipalities cannot charge additional fees if an applicant exercises this right, and qualified third-party reviewers and inspectors would not be permitted to charge more than the municipality’s fee.

Finally, the bill sets qualification, conflict of interest, and auditing standards, and the bill would also apply to home rule municipalities.

Legalizing Middle Housing (SB 4060, Hunter)

This is a big deal and is the key to unlock the solution to the housing shortage in Illinois. It would allow multifamily housing as of right on all lots that have a minimum area of 2,500 s.f. (To give some context the most common residential lot size in Chicago is 3,125 s.f. and in Oak Park the average residential lot ranges between 4,000 s.f. and 13,000 s.f. depending on the zoning district.)

The bill would permit between two and eight units of housing per lot in a residential zoning district, depending on the size of the lot. It would also permit new housing types that most municipalities ban:

  • Duplexes (a.k.a. two-flats)
  • Triplexes
  • Fourplexes
  • Cottage clusters
  • Townhouses
  • Stacked-flat plexes
  • Attached courtyard housing
  • Detached courtyard housing. This would allow a front house and an equal size rear house, which Chicago has vintage examples of and some architecture firms have proposed as part of the Missing Middle Infill Housing initiative, but the Chicago zoning code does not permit)
Future Firm, a design studio based in Chicago, created this concept that places two detached houses on a single property in Chicago. The current zoning code there does not permit more than one principal building per zoning lot, so if this were to get built the two houses would have to share some part of their structures.

What are some potential impacts?

In Chicago, there are 14,148 vacant lots that are zoned in a way that bans multi-family housing. If 5 percent of those were developed each year with a two-flat that would reduce the city’s housing shortage by 1,415 homes annually. (Chicago has seen an average of 4,357 new homes permitted from 2023-2025.) These zoning districts are pretty broadly distributed in Chicago, and overlap with all kinds of school attendance boundaries and near all kinds of amenities.

In Naperville, there are 35,449 (57 percent of the parcels in the city and 86 percent of parcels that allow residential uses) lots that ban multi-family housing. A minority of those would be improved to have two-family houses which would go a long way to increasing opportunity for Illinoisans (while also increase Naperville’s property tax revenues).

That’s almost too simplistic (and perhaps a bit optimistic) because the bill would permit more housing types than Chicago currently allows, like the detached courtyard housing – these new options would respond to the desire for lower-cost detached housing, increasing or maintaining the density on blocks where deconversions and teardowns are common.

The need for housing extends beyond Chicago and Oak Park. I ran this exercise here because it’s where I have the easiest access to high quality property and zoning data. Every town needs additional housing and additional housing types – for its existing residents and for future residents. Every town with transit service especially needs more housing, because more people should be allowed to take advantage of that service and that public investment.

Four two-flats in Logan Square
A courtyard-style building (but without the courtyard)

Parking Reform (SB 4064, Cervantes)

A municipality would not be allowed to require more than 0.5 automobile parking spaces per multifamily dwelling unit or more than one automobile parking space per single-family home.

And parking mandates would be eliminated for several uses:

  • individual dwelling units that have an area smaller than 1,500 s.f.
  • affordable housing developments
  • assisted living developments
  • ground floor non-residential uses in mixed-use buildings
  • when converting a building from non-residential to residential use

The standards would also apply in home rule communities.

Single Stair Reform (SB 4061, Feigenholtz)

Residential buildings up to six stories, with a maximum of four dwelling units per floor, an automatic sprinkler system, and automatic door closers, would be permitted to have a single interior exit stairway (“single stair”). Small multifamily buildings with a single means of egress are as safe or safer than those with more than one.

A typical new apartment building in Illinois has a “double loaded corridor” layout, which has a high apartment per stair ratio. The smart stair option in the center, not currently permitted, has a much lower apartment per stair ratio. The graphic on the right shows that a single stair building can have more variation in unit layouts and sizes (number of bedrooms).

The benefits improve quality of life by making it easier to design multi-bedroom and family-size homes with additional windows for more natural light, and inset porches (allowing for cross-breezes!) because space isn’t needed for a corridor to connect every unit to a second stair way. Homes are closer to the exit in these buildings. Plus, it makes it easier for small, multifamily buildings to “pencil” (make financial sense to undertake) on infill lots which tend to have higher land values.

Note about exiting: at the time of writing I live in a 450-unit apartment building that has five stairs that lead to two exterior stairs (and then there are more stairs after that). I counted that it takes about 220 steps (I have a long stride) to reach the ground; it took me 1 minute and 21 seconds to go from my apartment door, down the stairs, and over to the exterior exit. It takes a little bit more time to descend the last stair to the ground. In a single stair building, that would be limited to 20 feet – far less than the 600-or-so feet in my current abode.

Further reading:

ADUs (SB 4071, Martwick)

Do I even have to say what this is about? The bill would permit accessory dwelling units in all zoning districts that permit residential uses. The state ADU bill, as written in HB5626, could possibly invalidate the labor requirements for coach houses in Chicago (emphasis added):

(1) Each municipality shall permit accessory dwelling units in all zoning districts that permit single-family dwellings without additional requirements for lot size, setbacks, aesthetic requirements, design review requirements, frontage, space limitations, or other controls beyond those required for single-family dwelling units without an accessory dwelling unit.

A new construction coach house in Logan Square

Impact Fee Modernization (SB 4062, Castro)

The state would create formulas that set maximum impact fees, relative to the impact (i.e. number of students, domestic water and sewer, etc.) and incorporate certain unique contexts, to establish certainty for home builders. Municipalities, include those with home rule authority, would have to adopt the formulas within 30 months after the bill’s effective date.

The House has this package in a single omnibus bill: HB 5626.

Volunteers and Rep. Buckner
AHIL volunteers at the Springfield Amtrak station

Abundant Housing Illinois volunteers were in Springfield yesterday to listen to Governor Pritzker’s budget speech and to push for bold housing solutions to reduce the housing shortage – evident by continually rising prices – that persists across the state.

The new bills that Governor Pritzker’s office announced today – collectively called BUILD – will have a big impact on permitting new starter homes and allowing multi-family housing all over the state, among other changes to speed up housing construction. These bills will have the biggest effect on reducing housing costs when passed collectively.

Join Abundant Housing Illinois for the next lobby day.

Read another observation in A City That Works.