North suburban Evanston could soon be home to a downtown high-rise nearly as tall as Seattle's Space Needle. The city's Plan Commission recently green-lighted the project, and it comes before the city council tonight. The condominium tower itself is powerfully controversial. So is the fact that low- and middle-income people couldn't afford to live there. But the project's also part of a wider debate, about what America's downtowns should be, and what they're becoming. For Chicago Public Radio, Ken Davis has the story.
The transcript of the meetings runs thousands of pages. Strident community opposition to a tower twice as high as any in Evanston, and commissioners deeply divided. But in the end, they voted 4-3 for Klutznick-Fisher Development's concept.
KLUTZNICK: The tower itself is a tall slender tower, intended to be an elegant profile in the sky which is not unusual today.
Jim Klutznick has big projects in his DNA. His father did Old Orchard and Water Tower Place, and his partnership just completed Sherman Plaza, a sprawling mixed-use retail, condo and parking complex also right in downtown Evanston.
KLUTZNICK: So you have a critical mass of shops in combination with those other lifestyle kinds of uses that allows Evanston now to become competitive with Old Orchard.
Lifestyle, that may just be the biggest buzzword in development today. It's exemplified by places like the Glen in Glenview, the redeveloped Brickyard Mall in Chicago, or this: the new Deer Park Town Center near Rand and Lake-Cook Road. Simply stated - it's stores and attractions scattered in huge, landscaped parking lots made to resemble town centers, often where no town center ever really existed. So what does that have to do with a historic city like Evanston?
KLUTZNICK: What's happened with Evanston is it's become a lifestyle center on an urban street grid.
As Klutznick and others have brought in more and more national retailers, chain restaurants and movie theaters, parts of downtown are starting to resemble those lifestyle malls. It drives the dissenting Plan Commissioners crazy. Robin Schuldenfrei.
SCHULDENFREI: What's interesting about Evanston is that people come here for a certain quality of life and that's not chain retail stores. Nobody moves to Evanston because there's going to be a Banana Republic downtown.
There's intense pressure to find new revenues in Evanston to relieve the heavy property-tax burden. Mega-developments and chain store fill the coffers quickly, and the high-rise empty-nesters they attract use fewer city services - but they pay the same taxes. The trouble, according to Plan Commission dissenter Coleen Burrus, is that every new North Face or Ann Taylor Loft erodes the town's uniqueness.
BURRUS: It's a great place. We don't need to say this one spot needs a large, tall, 49-story building to make Evanston special, to make Evanston distinct. We are special, we are distinct.
Almost since its founding, Evanston has had a mixed population, and its range of income levels and racial groups has always been a source of civic pride. But Evanstonians like Ken Widemann believe this new wave of development is changing everything… and not for the better.
WIDEMANN: I don't want to see the building built myself. Why not? Because I think that every time you look around they're tearing buildings down, they're putting up too many condominiums in here….and I think what they need is more affordable housing.
GALLOWAY: Why should we discriminate against wealthy people who can afford to live in one of the nicest high-rise developments in Illinois?
Commissioner David Galloway not only voted in favor of the development, he says the high-end residents the new tower will attract will benefit Evanston greatly, because the new residents are likely to get involved with boards and commissions, and will have the influence to create new jobs and businesses citywide. But colleague Johanna Nyden - a no vote - has big concerns about how these projects present cities with hidden costs.
NYDEN: It's gonna create new tax dollars but it's not gonna create new tax dollars that will be available to the general fund until 2019 because it's in a TIF. And I think that's one of the things these downtowns face, they create these tifs to aid the redevelopment and then when the redevelopment gets going…you need to provide that with city services….but none of the money from those buildings is going into the general fund which pays for all those things.
Almost lost in this debate is the 80-year-old 708 Church building at Sherman and Church that would be demolished. Only two stories high, it has nine smaller, local retailers at street level and 109 smaller professional offices upstairs. These are exactly the kinds of businesses that won't have a home in the new development, and likely not anywhere nearby. But Commissioner Galloway thinks it's a price worth paying.
GALLOWAY: So while I think the 708 Church building is a quaint, relatively well-designed building of relatively nice proportions, given the thrust of the kind of development that we feel is important for Evanston to pursue, both now and in the future, it's expendable.
For more than a year, a separate group of citizens has been trying to forge a master plan for downtown Evanston, and they're grappling with the universal questions. How do you raise more revenue, maintain economic diversity, hold on to the town's historic nature, and not turn everything into a shopping center? If they figure it out, they'll be heroes to a lot of urban planners.
For Chicago Public Radio, this is Ken Davis.