Gov. JB Pritzker speaks at an event at the Governor’s Mansion on Wednesday, March 4. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Jenna Schweikert)
SPRINGFIELD – Gov. JB Pritzker said it once when he launched his bid for a third term last summer and he said it again during his State of the State address last month: “Everything is just too damned expensive.”
It’s hard to argue with that.
Wages have certainly gone up — in no small part because of policies Pritzker and legislative Democrats have championed, like raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. And policy measures like the expansion of the state’s earned income tax credit and child tax credit have put more money into the pockets of working people.
But much of those gains have been outpaced by the rise in costs of the things needed to build and sustain a quality life, such as housing, electricity, transportation and food.
These problems aren’t unique to Illinois. In many ways, the cost-of-living crunch is even more acute in coastal states like California and New York. And there are multiple drivers, including tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.
But for decades, there’s been a version of the same paradox: many places run by Democrats who champion the issue of affordability also happen to be among the least affordable places to live. This is often the result of what journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson labeled in their 2025 nonfiction book “Abundance” as “chosen scarcities.”
In essence, the New York Times bestseller explores the failures of liberal governance to adequately meet some of the pressing demands of our time. One of my main takeaways after reading it last year was that policies and processes born out of good intentions don’t always deliver good — or intended — results.
The theory goes that layers of restrictions, regulations and red tape can make it expensive, and often nearly impossible, to build the housing, energy and transportation infrastructure needed to create a better future.
“Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do,” they write.
Pritzker and Democrats across the country seem to have gotten the message.
After years of focusing on the demand side of the ledger with policies like increasing the minimum wage, Pritzker had added some supply side solutions to his arsenal.
Most notably, Pritzker introduced a wide-ranging plan to address Illinois’ housing shortage that would drastically limit local governments’ authority to block multi-unit housing, legalize accessory dwelling units, impose statewide timelines for housing permit reviews and inspections, and curb minimum parking requirements.
A recent study pegged the housing shortage at about 142,000 units. The state will need to build more than 227,000 units in the next five years just to keep up with demand. This shortfall has contributed to a 37% spike in home prices over five years and a 64% decrease in home listings. New construction permits are also down 13%.
The governor also signed an executive order the morning of the address setting the goal of beginning development on new nuclear power plants that can deliver at least two gigawatts more energy capacity, which would be enough to power 2 million homes.
It comes after a report from three state agencies last year predicted electricity shortages and continued high rates across Illinois as demand rises from data centers, and fossil fuel plants retire faster than new clean energy can be built and connected to the grid.
Nuclear has not been warmly embraced by environmentalists, who prefer that the state meet its ambitious goals mostly through building up renewable energy like wind and solar.
However, nuclear is the most significant source of carbon-free baseload power. In fact, Illinois’ six existing nuke plants supply about 53% of the state’s energy.
Pritzker was slow to embrace the expansion of nuclear. But it has come to be a necessity amid rising power demand and the slow pace with which renewables are coming online.
He signed a bill in 2023 allowing the construction of small modular reactors generating less than 300 megawatts. Earlier this year, he signed a law lifting the state’s 35-year-old moratorium on new large-scale nuclear power plants.
“Bringing those online, creating more nuclear power stations in the state of Illinois should be easier for us than it is for other states,” Pritzker told my colleague Ben Szalinski and me in an interview earlier this week. “Why? Because we already have nuclear. So people understand it. There isn’t this broad sense of NIMBY – ‘Not In My Backyard.’
“And companies want to know they can also find the nuclear engineers that they need, the people to run the plants,” Pritzker said. “And we have all of that in the state of Illinois. So we have a real opportunity to bring down prices.”
Indeed, nuclear power has bipartisan support.
Statewide preemption of local zoning authority? That will be a tougher sell.
The Illinois Municipal League, which represents the state’s cities and towns, opposes Pritzker’s proposed zoning changes.
“Illinois communities vary widely in geography, population density, infrastructure capacity and housing demand,” said Peoria Mayor Rita Ali, one of IML’s officers. “A one-size-fits-all statewide mandate cannot adequately reflect these differences. Don’t preempt all of our authority. Instead, give us more authority to implement solutions locally.”
Expect an uphill battle.
But the fact that Pritzker is picking the fight signals how the politics of ‘Yes In My Backyard’ have become far more palatable amid mounting pressure from constituencies to tackle the factors driving up the cost of living.
“These are not problems that can be solved on a community-by-community basis and require clear expectations and standards across the state,” a coalition of housing advocacy groups, including Abundant Housing Illinois and Housing Action Illinois wrote in a statement supporting Pritzker’s plan.
Pritzker, for what it’s worth, isn’t much for buzzwords like “abundance.”
“I don’t think much about the labels that people put on these policies,” Pritzker told us. “I would just say we’re trying to lower costs for people. We’re trying to make life more livable for people.”
Klein and Thompson had a simple thesis for their book: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.”
Whether you call it abundance or affordability, that’s clearly Pritzker’s aim here with housing and energy. Time will tell if he’s successful.
Brenden Moore is a politics and government reporter for Capitol News Illinois, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. Moore in Springfield is his regular analysis column.
