Ryan Spain discusses Housing Affordability and Reducing Home Building Costs in Illinois

And Representative Spain, what's your what's your cup of tea for all of those are important. If I could wave a magic wand, I would do redistricting reform in the state of Illinois. We're going to have But without that magic wand, another important topic that we've spent a lot of time. a Q&A time here in a moment. Debating, deliberating, and adjusting is on the topic of housing affordability. You didn't even talk about that. Yes, you're so right. I applaud the governor for bringing this forward, saying that we need more housing, not just affordable housing, but we call it middle-income housing throughout. All parts of the state of Illinois. It's holding back some of our economic growth when we attract employers, but there's no places for their workforce to live. I think it's an important topic. Some of the governor's solutions, I think, missed the mark a little bit, you know, aiming on how to take away certain elements of local control. That may not be the best solution, but there's a lot of things that We're a part of a broad housing affordability package that I think are important that we keep going on. The big missing piece that I saw from everything that was introduced, there was nothing as part of the governor's plan to actually bend the cost curve down for the price of home building. And in Illinois. And Senator Cunningham and Senator Resn from a JCAR perspective have both seen a lot of this. We've passed without the full consideration of the General Assembly, lots of mandates, housing mandates, building code and energy code adjustments that don't come before the public, but they have raised the cost of building in the state of Illinois. And so when you talk to the folks that actually do this work of making new homes, They have come up with a long list of suggestions on things we can do to be more nimble, more flexible, and actually start to take the cost of home building and bend it down to maybe the tune of $50,000 or $75,000 for every new home in the state of Illinois. So as we continue working, that's going to be an important piece of the governor's housing solution. And we've had very productive conversations with the administration on that Isn't that part of, he wants to be able to take the price down by eliminating some of those, all those codes and rules that everybody has to follow to build and, you know. Well, we've had discussions about things like the requirement for two stairwells related to the size of a building. That's been kind of a little bit of a sideshow, and there's a safety component to that. I think we should redirect our efforts to things like, you know, what are the insulation requirements and glazing factors of windows and how the improved efficiency is related to cost. And those are actually the things that I think will matter much more in making housing more affordable. Very good.