(7th Ward Resident)
City Council Meeting
July 21, 2025
Dear Mayor and Council Members:
A Comprehensive Plan is not meant to lay out specific policy. It is not meant to get into the weeds, and it is not meant to keep a city “preserved in amber,” as one of my favorite public commenters put it at the last meeting. A Comprehensive Plan is meant to be a living, values-driven, aspirational, visionary, and, one might even say, moral document. As such, it should reflect Evanston’s best, wisest, and most compassionate self.
One of the primary attacks on the initial revised Comprehensive Plan as presented last year was that it was too specific. I believe it was someone on the Land Use Commission who said that he had never seen such specific housing policy recommendations in a Comprehensive Plan. And so, in response to the very diligent, loud, at times personally attacking and vitriolic feedback from primarily white, affluent, retirement-aged (who else has time to attend every Land Use and Council meeting?), single-family homeowners, city staff, who were frequent targets of vitriol and abuse themselves, re-drafted the Comprehensive Plan and it became the document you are considering tonight and for some short time more, perhaps.
The City staff not only removed much of the specific policy proposals; by doing so, they also , through no fault of their own, couldn’t help but alter the spirit of this previously visionary document. It became less concerned with creating more housing capacity, affordability, and flexibility in Evanston, less concerned with welcoming folks of all races, ethnicities and socioeconomic classes who may already work here and would love to live where they work, less about truly supporting the Black middle-income folks who are leaving the city in droves. Instead, the document is now concerned with keeping things as they are or only changing things “over there” in someone else’s ward. If the Comprehensive Plan passes as it exists in this iteration, Evanston, where we white folks purport to value the diversity from whiteness that Evanston provides, will be ignoring the hemorrhaging of our Black population and the less-than-ideal housing situations of our Latiné neighbors.
In essence, the current iteration of the Comprehensive Plan has become less about considering the housing needs of folks who were not speaking or raging in the direction of the dais – I recall one Land Use Commissioner’s complaint that “racial equity” was mentioned a lot in the Comprehensive Plan (twice by my count in the revised draft from November and still twice in this draft) and that he didn’t know what the phrase meant. He said city staff should “define it or take it out.” (This objection raises a separate concern about the training commissioners and anyone working in an official capacity with the city, volunteer or otherwise, receive regarding the history of anti-Black and otherwise racist and xenophobic policies in Evanston, but that is another meeting altogether).
The Comprehensive Plan has become more about preserving Evanston for those who are here already. At least that’s the desire of those still complaining, after nine months of listening to them rage, that they haven’t been heard. Of course, “those who are here already” always seems to be defined, obliquely, in terms of the very group speaking up at these meetings – affluent, white, retired, single family homeowners who remember a less complicated Evanston that never existed. Preservation without wise discernment and framing of the past’s shortcomings is always necessarily preservation of a past that was problematic, harmful, and denied homeownership and, thus, generational wealth, to a vast swath of Evanston’s current population. Preservation, which is backwards looking, is antithetical to progress and does not entail any vision of an improved or more equitable and just future. Preservation, in Evanston as well as all of America (we are not unique in this), preserves a system based on a history of racist, classist, exclusionary single-family-only zoning. The facts of history do not lie – redlining was real and exclusionary zoning was, and is, simply redlining 2.0, a way to continue to segregate and disinvest without violating the letter of the law. To those who are opposed to a revised and visionary Comprehensive Plan and perceive it as threatening to deprive them of something they value in Evanston the way it has been, I would ask that you consider your fellow and future Evanstonians. Equity is not pie; it is expansive. One thing that I have seen in the last 9 years living here is that when Evanston puts its mind to something, the resources in human and financial capital materialize as if by magic.
And to Council, we, the less-strident majority of Evanston residents, the ones who voted overwhelmingly to re-elect a mayor who introduced Envision Evanston when those opposed were making sure everyone knew that EE45 was the issue on the ballot, ask that you consider the current draft of the Comprehensive Plan in light of how it functions as guidance for crafting Evanston’s strategic housing plan and the zoning code that will come before you later this year. Consider the values expressed in these documents. This document is milquetoast at best when it comes to embedding values such as racial and ethnic equity, socioeconomic justice, and environmental wisdom.
Our Comprehensive Plan should at least attempt to envision a future City that is not wholly dedicated to preservation, but also focused on creative, nimble, problem-solving that is responsive rather than reactive to the challenges of the present moment.
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