It’s a good thing the west side of Evanston is finally getting some attention from developers. Now the neighborhood’s long-time residents just need to make sure it’s the kind of attention they want.

If they don’t watch out, they’ll end up booted from the neighborhood they’ve occupied for decades and replaced by commuting yuppies.

Developers have proposed a number of new residential developments around some of the city’s more dilapidated areas. This plan makes sense for everyone. Nice large condo projects can be built relatively cheaply because of available land and industrial buildings. People will buy them because of their proximity to downtown Evanston and Chicago. The neighborhood will get a boost when vacant areas or old industrial structures turn into homes.

Many a neighborhood in Chicago has been down this path, and residents of Evanston’s west side would do well to watch what’s happened there: Condos come in, rents go up, more condos are built, old stores are replaced by tanning salons and Starbucks.

A run-down neighborhood with cheap houses and abandoned industrial sites becomes a nice neighborhood with less crime. But almost none of the same people live there.

It’s a story near completion in Wicker Park, it’s underway in Uptown and it’s starting in Pilsen. Chicago has seemingly done little to ensure that old-time residents of a neighborhood are able to reap the benefits of its regrowth.

Evanston should do better on its west side.

Some of the projects’ neighbors are already concerned about the direction of growth. They want retail centers, they say, not condominiums they can’t afford. Ald. Delores Holmes (5th) has said gentrification is inevitable.

She’s right. Gentrification cannot be completely averted, but it could be largely stymied if the city and the neighborhood’s residents work together. They must be clear about what type of development they want – and what they don’t.

The condo developments that are coming in now are good. They’re not yet leveling existing homes or business areas. They’ll bring new life blood and a wealthier demographic group into the area.

But if they’re successful, they also will bring in more proposals for increasingly destructive and expensive condo developments. The city must resist the temptation to accept them all, despite the property tax revenue it might bring in.

Instead, it must use the area’s new economic vitality to bring in the development residents actually want, like grocery stores, retail centers and businesses they can use.

The city already knows what its residents want. It adopted a neighborhood plan for the area that focuses on building up the neighborhood’s commercial areas.

So Evanston should follow through. The condo developments are bringing the steam, but the city’s leaders need to do something productive with it. City government as plenty of tools at its disposal to shape growth, like zoning changes or approvals for planned developments. It should give residents what they want.

The area’s long-term residents suffered through the neighborhood’s decline. They fought to restart its development. They deserve to reap the rewards.

City Editor Paul Thissen is a Medill junior. He can be reached at [email protected].