Earlier this month I made the trip down to Springfield to volunteer with Abundant Housing Illinois, an advocacy organization pushing for more housing options across the state. It was our biggest group ever, with 39 people going from five Illinois municipalities, and most of us took Amtrak there and back.
The day was a mix of orientation, refining our housing stories and why we volunteer, and then walking the halls of the Capitol to speak with legislators and their staff. Our housing advocates talked to twenty Illinois General Assembly members about reforming local codes that prevent people from being able to afford housing all over the state. We spoke in support of the BUILD plan I wrote about earlier.
Chloe, Rep. Bob Morgan, BenEveryone wore their AHIL t-shirtGov. Pritzker happened to come down the stairs near our groupPhotos by Stephen Stassen
It’s important – although inefficient – to show up in person and make the case directly. The legislators we met with were highly or quite receptive, though you never quite know what interactions or talking points will actually move the needle. All of the six bills in the BUILD plan have not yet passed committee; but that doesn’t stop them from moving forward through other means.
If you care about housing in Illinois — whether that’s affordability, supply, or just the ability to build an ADU in your backyard — Abundant Housing Illinois is worth knowing about. Join us!
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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 SquareA courtyard-style building (but without the courtyard)
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.
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.
Further reading:
Minnesota study on fire risk of buildings with a single stair compared to buildings with more than one store
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.
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. BucknerAHIL 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.
If you live in northern Illinois, your electricity supply is among the most reliable in the country, and you have nuclear power to thank for that. Unlike many other regions that struggle with grid stability, our northern Illinois benefits from a network of five nuclear power plants that provide a steady, dependable base load of electricity. If we want to maintain this advantage—and meet the growing demand for electricity—we need to build more nuclear power plants. (Illinois has a sixth nuclear power plant, but the Clinton generating station is in a different “subgrid”.)
ComEd commissioned a study in 2022 which showed that as more households transition to electric heating and driving (two changes among many others predicted and necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions) our grid will need additional capacity. Heat pumps and electrified buildings are great for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, but a steady, always-on power source – one that doesn’t disappear at sunset, and one that doesn’t emit any carbon – is necessary and expected. That’s where nuclear power comes in, which has been working for Illinoisans for the last 65 years.
A group of nuclear engineers and advocates tours the Byron Generating Station in Byron, Illinois (2023, Michael McLean).
The study, written by Energy and Environmental Economics, says, “as a result of electrification for buildings, industry, and transportation, statewide electricity demand grows by 89% and 127% in the Moderate Electrification and High Electrification scenarios, respectively.”
Currently, Illinois law bans new nuclear power plants of the types that already exist here. In a silly way, Illinois law allows nuclear power plants of a type that don’t actually exist. Thankfully, HB 3604 is a bill in the Illinois House that was passed by committee last week that would repeal the ban on existing nuclear power plant types, allowing new ones – including their updated versions – to be built.
SB 1527 is the equivalent in the Illinois Senate and while it didn’t get approved by a committee, its deadline was extended to April 4. Bill sponsor Illinois State Senator Sue Rezin coauthored this op-ed in Crain’s, writing, “In recent years, experts have warned that Illinois is on track to shift from a net exporter to a net importer of energy, making us dependent on neighboring states for our power demands. Meanwhile, states like Georgia, Tennessee, and Wyoming are advancing nuclear projects while Illinois remains stuck in the past.
PJM is the grid price manager for northern Illinois, including Chicago, and the PJM region reaches from here to Jersey Shore. This means that demand for electricity anywhere in the PJM region affects Chicago, and generation capacity and reliability in northern Illinois can affect prices in Newark.
Several times a year PJM holds an electricity pricing auction in which distributors – like ComEd – and other high-need consumers – like data center operators – indicate, by bidding, how much electricity they believe they’ll require over the next time period. Generation companies – like Exelon – use this pricing auction to determine which plants they’ll keep running to supply electricity at those prices (different plants and energy sources have different operating costs).
Nuclear power has an unmatched ability to generate massive amounts of electricity without greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a good complement to other carbon-free generation like wind and solar, ensuring that even on a still or cloudy day, their intermittency doesn’t affect keeping lights, heating, and the wifi, on.
In fact, PJM rates nuclear power’s Effective Load Carrying Capability (ELCC) at 95 percent, the highest of all generation and storage types, even higher than batteries (which may not be charged when they’re needed, or could be depleted in the cold). Another way to understand ELCC is that the number is a prediction that a generation source will not have a “loss of load” event in any given hour. PJM expects that nuclear power plants will operate 8,322 hours each year and sun-tracking solar panel farms to provide electricity 1,226 hours each year.
Illinois, and whichever power markets it’s part of now (PJM) or in the future, needs more nuclear energy. Next year, rate payers – electricity consumers, you and me – can expect to pay higher rates per kWh because other buyers are coming into the market and willing to pay higher rates for the most reliable sources. Specifically, data center operators want access to nuclear power. One piece of good news is that the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan will be restarting within a few years, and that source will bolster the supply in the MISO1 region, next door.
Last month, WSPY interviewed State Representative Harry Benton, a cosponsor of HB3604, reporting, “Benton says nuclear energy could help provide power to data centers across the state without a significant impact to other users on the power grid.”
Alan Medsker is a nuclear energy advocate I met the last time I went to Springfield to lobby (with a lowercase “L”) for housing abundance. He testified at the House committee this month to raise awareness about rising prices due to rising demand:
PJM and MISO face a crisis of surging load growth and a simultaneous retirement of many reliable sources of power. This confluence of events will soon cause large rate hikes on ratepayers across the state. Together, the General Assembly and Governor’s office have worked hard to attract new businesses to our state, especially data centers.
Data centers bring with them large 24/7 energy demands. For this reason, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are considering all nuclear reactor design options to meet their energy requirements, and they are going to make sure they can get the power they need, when planning to build. Several of them are already partnering with nuclear reactor developers. If we restrict their options, they will almost certainly look elsewhere – there are plenty of other states that welcome nuclear energy developers, and some are even providing incentives.
Nuclear power plants’ high electricity generation capacity supports a reliable grid of delivery to the home and some price stability that prevents the kind of energy price spikes seen in areas that rely too much on oil and natural gas. In the 2024 “capacity obligation” auction for energy delivery in 2025-2026, PJM announced “capacity prices for the 2025/26 delivery year soared to $269.92/MW-day, up from $28.92/MW-day in the last auction”. Nuclear power accounted for only 21 percent of energy capacity provided by generators in that auction while gas accounted for 48 percent.
“The spike in capacity prices was driven by power plant retirements, increased load, and new market rules that aim to better reflect risks from extreme weather — coupled with new resource accreditation metrics that are designed to reflect how much capacity a resource delivers during system stresses.”, Utility Dive reported. The nine times increase may not be fully reflected on consumers’ bills.
The alternative of having more power from non-nuclear sources is a future where electricity providers struggle to meet demand and return to using more fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration predicts coal-burning will still occur in 2050!
That’s not a future we should accept. Solar and wind are being installed faster these days, providing more of the energy mix, but they and the requisite new transmission and storage infrastructure are decades away – at least – from potentially taking over the responsibilities that nuclear and gas have been taking care of since the 1960s.
Illinois has the workforce, expertise, and supply chain to expand nuclear power and accommodate rising demand and temper rising prices. We should take advantage of it by re-legalizing nuclear power plants in the state.
MISO is the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, another regional grid price manager like PJM. ↩︎
One of the many benefits of allowing pocket neighborhoods and cottage courts is being able to share high land costs. That, and sharing child care duties, are primary reasons that Phil Levin and Kristen Berman created “Radish”, a pocket neighborhood in Oakland.
Phil founded Live Near Friends, a website advising people on which steps to take to eventually live near friends and family and live happier by focusing on the hard part of finding appropriate real estate, setting up community standards, and arranging rent and legal concerns. He also is a co-founder of Culdesac, in Tempe, Arizona, an apartment complex with a traditional design of close-together buildings and shops near transit.
Phil takes Kirsten Dirksen, who produces videos about uncommon homes, on a tour of Radish, where the viewer can meet the residents, and learn about the architecture of the buildings and outdoor space plus a little about the process to combine two lots into what he calls a “friend compound”.
I previously wrote about cottage courts and how the Chicago zoning code does not allow them, primarily by disallowing more than one house per property. For Chicago, cottage courts can additionally offer the benefit of achieving the same density as a series of two-flats – so as not to reduce the population or population capacity of a neighborhood – while responding to the demand for detached housing and yards – which are putting pressure on two-flats and leading to their deconversions or teardowns. Two-flats have been a typical way for Chicagoans to live in a multigenerational setting, something that cottage courts can also promote.
Radish comprises two properties that started with two existing apartment buildings and an existing backyard house. Levin et. al. added another backyard house (ADU), a small building for a coworking office and shared kitchen (called “Blueberry” on the site plan below), and an RV for housing guests. All of those additions encircle a large shared space with a grassy yard, communal and scattered seating, a fire pit, a hot tub, and a sauna, separated from the car parking area by a privacy fence.
The lot area of the two parcels is about 18,859 s.f. The site plan is from 2020 and the population count reflects that year. Site plan: Supernuclear
In total, there are eight dwelling units on the property in four houses on an 18,589 s.f. set of two parcels. That lot area is the equivalent of six standard size lots in Chicago, on which 12-18 dwelling units will typically be found. But, that large lot size is atypical for Oakland.
Another aspect of cottage courts is that they can facilitate sharing food, high-cost resources (like a hot tub), and child care. Phil, the other residents, and even former residents who live nearby and stop by during the filming, describe how the cooking and child care is shared in the video. Phil’s blog details how he and his wife, Kristen, “built Radish to be a great place to have kids”.
Stay tuned for another blog post on this topic. I worked with Jamin Nollsch to create a cottage court site plan specific for Chicagoans to pair with a memo and sample ordinance that I wrote to promote legalizing this form of housing and living here.
