Lonnie Wilson’s family has lived in Evanston’s west side for 100 years. Growing up across the street from Evanston Township High School, the 54-year-old community organizer remembers a time when kids living on the same street walked to school together, when gang activity was non-existent, when “there were people all around you who could be role models.” This was the age before business development slowed to a stop in the city’s historically black neighborhood.

“Evanston’s Fifth Ward had an economic engine of its own,” Wilson recalled. “But somewhere between the mid-’70s to the early ’80s, things started to fall apart.”

Northeastern areas of Evanston such as downtown and the lakefront began to blossom with the help of city funds. Meanwhile, on the west side, middle class families were moving out, mom-and-pop store owners were retiring, and money just couldn’t seem to flow over Ridge Avenue.

“You witness changes that downtown Evanston has gone through, you witness changes that some parts of the east side have gone through, but then you see the west side has generally been static,” Ald. Lionel Jean-Baptiste (2nd) said. “There is disparity and inequity in the City of Evanston.”

Now some west side residents have taken the fate of their community into their own hands. After years of meetings, research and preliminary plans, they propelled the Evanston City Council to approve the West Evanston Tax Increment Financing District in late 2005 and the West Evanston Plan in May 2007, resulting in increasing amounts of funding slowly nourishing the area back to life. The proposed Capital Improvement Plan for the 2010-11 fiscal year, which the council will discuss further this month, currently allots nearly $500,000 dollars solely for economic development in west Evanston.

“It’s good that we have finally turned our attention in a meaningful way to Evanston’s west side,” Ald. Jane Grover (7th) said. “The west side is important to all of us in Evanston.”THE WEST EVANSTON TIF DISTRICT

A head caterer dressed in black silently monitored the sanctuary-turned-dinner party at the Unitarian Church of Evanston, 1330 Ridge Ave. Well-known local leaders, including Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl and her predecessor, Lorraine H. Morton, mingled and munched at Evanston Community Development Corporation’s third annual Citizen Awards dinner Saturday night to honor community activist Bennett Johnson. ECDC, the organization that advocates for the west side and spearheaded the West Evanston TIF District effort, formed in 2003 in order to spur development in the area while protecting the residents who live there from being pushed out.

Diane Lupke, secretary for the organization, said ECDC is excited about the prospects a TIF district offers.

“If you have a TIF district, you have funds that are guaranteed for you and must be invested on the west side,” she said. “They cannot be invested somewhere else.”

Once a TIF district is established, any property tax increase from that area is reinvested into the community it came from instead of bloating the general pot.

“Right now it’s going well, but the economic stagnation that we’re experiencing is putting a damper on how quickly the fund is increasing,” Jean-Baptiste said.

This year the CIP allots $80,000 in TIF money to be funneled to ECDC. Of that $30,000 will be doled out to potential new businesses as no-interest loans, while the other $50,000 will employ a loan officer to work exclusively on internal business development, a constant priority of ECDC.

Due to the west side’s comparatively affordable property values, outside developers began to eye the area. Residents worried about gentrification because their neighborhood had no zoning restrictions in place, so developers could swoop in and change the face of their neighborhood without constraint.

“There was no sense of planning,” Jean-Baptiste said. “A developer could just purchase a piece of land, build on it and lobby the city council or ask for variance for what they want to do.”

Now with revenue from the TIF district and guidance from the West Evanston Plan, community leaders are looking forward to restoring the area to what it once was.

“The desire for west-side businesses and homes to be owned by people on the west side is very, very strong,” Lupke said. “People understand how important that is in turning around the economy-people owning what they have as a way to build overall wealth on the west side.”

But it’s an uphill climb. Ald. Delores Holmes (5th) said Boocoo, a music center and café on the corner of Church Street and Dodge Avenue, is the only new business her ward has seen for several years.

“No development has been done in the ward,” Holmes said. “We’re always fighting for equity.”

SEPARATE, BUT EQUAL?

The historical divide between east and west dates back to Evanston’s first residents, who settled here in the mid-1800’s, Jean-Baptiste said.

“They were white folks who came with their servants, and their servants were black,” he said. “They were restricted to the west side of town, they were restricted to certain schools, certain hospitals, and the city itself didn’t give them priority.”

Jean-Baptiste, an Evanston resident since 1964, added there were areas in the west with streets that weren’t even paved 27 years ago.

Wilson, a community organizer active with ECDC, agreed Evanston was truly not one town, but two.

“When I was a child, I knew the barriers weren’t political or legal or law-binding, but Evanston had the same apartheid as South Africa,” he said. “I knew not to go across Ridge; I knew not to go across Green Bay … It was never said to me, but the dominant feeling around town was that, ‘I stay in my place.'”

Despite this intense feeling of separation, the community flourished. Lupke said the west side was home to a very strong, middle class, African-American community.

“They were professionals; they owned their homes, owned businesses,” she said. “Evanston’s diversity was really a true diversity.”

John Fuller, a member of the board of directors for ECDC, easily pictures the 20 or so businesses lining his childhood block. Johnson, president of the Evanston/North Shore NAACP and editor of the Evanston Sentinel, said mom-and-pop stores drove the local economy.

So what happened to all of those educated business-owners?

“As those individuals began to have more opportunities, they began to leave Evanston for bigger pools,” Lupke said. “And as those residents succeeded and moved away, those that came to fill that spot, because this was an affordable place, were African-Americans from other locations without those same roots.”

At the same time, schools, hospitals and stores began to desegregate. Ironically the unification that gave African-Americans equal rights disabled the small businesses owned by African-Americans and dependent upon loyal black customers.

“The price that we’ve paid for desegregation has been huge,” said Jerome Summers, an Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Board of Education member. “All of those things are gone now. All of them are gone.”“IT’S JUST FLAT WRONG”

At a Feb. 16 District 65 school board meeting, board members gave the nod to Superintendent Hardy Murphy to cap next fall’s kindergarten classes at three elementary schools as a short-term solution to the district’s current overcrowding problem. As a result an estimated 28 kindergartners won’t be able to attend their neighborhood schools but instead will be bused to another, more open school. Parents and school board members expressed outrage about the shift.

What they don’t realize is that every single child in the Fifth Ward endures this scenario every year.

Foster School, the west side’s only elementary school, disappeared after Evanston desegregated in 1967. Since then children on the west side have been bussed to seven different schools across the city instead of attending their neighborhood s
chool.

“It is just flat wrong; it is just flat wrong to bus every single kid out of one community to diversify another community,” Summers said. “I went to 10 PTA meetings last year-I saw six black parents. I’ve been to five or six PTA meetings this year, and it’s the same kind of thing because they don’t feel a connection to the school.”

Wilson said his parent’s generation had a sense of self that has never been replicated because “it was schooled in all-black schools and neighborhood schools,” and now that structure is gone.

An elementary school is not the only resource young children in the area are missing.

“They never built a library on the west side, although there’s been demand for it for many, many years,” said Johnson, who’s lived in Evanston since he was 2 years old. “It all comes down to the desegregation of Foster School. If that had remained, I think that would be helpful to stabilize the community.”

Summers isn’t ruling out a new Fifth Ward school in the future. He understands the kindergarten cap as a short-term resolution and sees the construction of a new school as the answer to the district’s long-term space issues.

“It would solve every single overcrowding problem in the foreseeable future without a doubt,” he said. “The Fifth Ward is perfectly, strategically placed to alleviate the overcrowding problems.”

But when Summers brought up the idea at the board’s Feb. 16 meeting, it was dismissed due to budgetary constraints. In a presentation by Lora Taira, District 65’s assistant director of information services, the price tag for a new facility would be $9 million.

Despite financial obstacles Summers stands by his opinion that a school is necessary for success in the west side.

“Structurally all small communities have businesses, homeowners, places where people worship and a school,” Summers said. “If you take away any one of those pillars, the other things start to disintegrate.”THE NEXT GENERATION

One of the simplest, yet most important, benefits of attending a local school is the act of walking to class with neighbors, Summers said. When that doesn’t happen, there are lasting consequences, he said.

“It diminishes your allegiance to your neighborhood and your neighbors,” he said. “It shows up later where you have gangs or teenagers and young adults who actually shoot each other.”

Jean-Baptiste said there are more crimes on the west side of town than the east side and part of the problem stems from the 60 students a year who drop out of ETHS, a minority of students, but a visible one, he said.

“You have a group of young people who are not going to college, they’re falling through the cracks, and they’re dropping out of school, and they’re not being trained to do anything,” he said. “They become, to a certain extent, predators. They become parasitical on the rest of the community.”

Evanston Police Department Cmdr. Tom Guenther did not say crime was more prevalent on the west side, but he agreed crime does concentrate in certain areas of the city.

“There are spikes in certain areas, in certain small, small pockets,” he said.

In order to curb crime on the west side specifically, Wilson founded an Evanston branch of an organization called Community Builders about 10 years ago. Community Builders aims to give construction work to young black men in order to let them learn skills for more jobs in the future, he said.

Alexander Daniel, a west-side resident, participated in the program and said he is now working to help other men like himself.

“A lot of our friends never made it to 30 years of age,” Daniel said. “We try to stick our head out there and let them know what we’ve been through: how it’s not really worth it and there’s plenty of opportunities to make different money, so it ain’t all about gang banging and selling drugs. We’re trying to change our life around.”

And Community Builders isn’t the only program helping youth involved in illegal activity. EPD provides several services to assist youth: free counseling, community service programs and check-ins with past offenders and their parents.

Jean-Baptiste views such programs as integral to community success.

“To the extent that we don’t intentionally organize a process to re-steer these youth, to train them to have a skill, to train them to be able to work in our local businesses, then we will continue to have a profile of a criminal in Evanston as a young black male,” the alderman said. “And there will continue to be low expectations.”MOVING FORWARD

Despite economic stagnation and education issues, west-side activists are looking toward the future of their community. They’ve accomplished a lot: They’ve secured additional funding from the city through the newest TIF district and fought for power over outside developers coming into their backyards with the West Evanston Plan.

Now the west side awaits $490,000 which the council has to approve as part of its massive Capital Improvement Plan for the 2010-11 fiscal year.

During discussion about the plan at the Feb. 22 council meeting, Jean-Baptiste said he thinks there’s been a history of inequality in the city’s spending.

“Alderman Jean-Baptiste is correct: More money has been spent on the downtown, I believe, than his ward,” Tisdahl said.

But things are changing.

“We are spending money now on his ward and hoping to create jobs and businesses that are thriving in that ward,” Tisdahl said.

Wilson said working together will be critical to the success of his family’s neighborhood. With the TIF district in effect for 20 more years, there’s plenty of time for key partnerships to put fresh money to good use. Rivalries between the east and the west need to end, he said.

“All that stuff has to stop,” he said. “If we don’t stop, we’re all going down. Whether we know it or not, we’re all on the same planet.”[email protected]