How often have you moved?

Don’t email with a response or anything, but consider the question, and then think about others in your circle. My parents, married in 1974, purchased one house, in 1978. There has been extensive remodeling and expansion, but it’s the same street address and landline phone number (albeit on the third area code, after being removed from both 312 and 708).

My wife’s parents sold their first home around 1993 to move into the house they built, where they remain. My wife and I, married in 2002, bought our first house in Iowa in 2003. We moved back to Illinois in 2007. Then three more in-state moves since, as recently as last summer.

Renting is a whole different story, and we’ll spare readers the family history portion, but the narrative serves as useful context for reading coverage of Gov. JB Pritzker’s recently announced push to change the state’s affordable housing statistics.

Three Shaw Media reporters collaborated on a useful overview of municipal opposition to the threat of statewide zoning rules undercutting decades of local authority (tinyurl.com/ZoningPushback), and digesting that information along with the Capitol News Illinois overview of the Building Up Illinois Developments initiative (tinyurl.com/CNI-BUILD) engenders a little sympathy for anyone trying to make arguments on any side of the issue to an audience for whom the cost of housing isn’t a daily concern.

Obviously, the value of any real estate is an important consideration for budgeting because Illinois governments rely so heavily on property taxes. But “affordable housing” is also somewhat of a nebulous concept for people who aren’t in the market as buyers or sellers.

Realtor.com and IllinoisRealtors.org both offer useful data dashboards providing macro context. Closed sales were up 4.2% in 2025, and the median price was up 3.4%. In December, the median sale price was $170 per square foot, while the median monthly rent was $2,138.

But statewide information only goes so far. The same is true of last year’s University of Illinois study that showed we’re about 142,000 housing units short and would need to build 227,000 over the next five years to keep up with demand. There is more than enough space in Illinois to build that much housing, and Pritzker could probably make a case for underwriting some of the effort in the name of economic development. However, if people wanted to live in places with open land (or currently vacant homes), the market would already have responded to those needs.

Yes, this is an oversimplification. But so are most solutions, including some laws already on the books that aren’t achieving stated goals.

Housing shortages are a valid concern worth state attention, but broad strokes rarely address meaningful local factors.

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Local News Network. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.