Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss announced an overhaul to the city’s comprehensive plan and zoning code in February. On today’s Everything Evanston episode, The Daily explains the key issues at stake in this initiative.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: Evanston’s current zoning code was approved in 1993. Its current comprehensive plan spans issues like land use, public facilities, parking and landscaping. That plan was approved in 2000.
SHUN GRAVES: But on Feb. 6, Mayor Daniel Biss gathered before a crowd of residents and announced a plan to overhaul both of those documents. The new zoning code and comprehensive plan would go into effect next year, and these new policies would guide Evanston for the next two decades.
From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Shun Graves.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: And I’m Edward Simon Cruz. This is Everything Evanston.
Today, we explain the city’s ambitious effort to revise its major policies — an effort it’s calling Envision Evanston 2045.
So I was at this meeting on Feb. 6, and there seemed to be a lot of energy in the room, a lot of anticipation. There are a lot of these key issues, kind of eight that got picked out in some of the major documents that have come forth since then: land use, zoning, transportation, housing, climate, equity and racial justice, economic development, public health.
Now, those are all pretty broad topics, and they encompass a lot of different kind of areas of city life. But for Mayor Biss, I think that seems to be part of the point. It seems like he wants this sort of ambition, this sort of “bold action” as he put it in that May op-ed that he wrote for the Chicago Tribune.
What do you, having covered the mayor for some time now, make of this effort and the kind of approach that he’s taking toward it?
SHUN GRAVES: Right. Well, to a lot of people, Envision Evanston conjures really vague words like “plan,” “future,” “input,” “community,” and in some ways it does.
But Mayor Biss has really, especially in the op-ed, pushed a more concrete and possibly political objective. He’s called it “yes in my backyard.” Essentially, it’s a zoning overhaul that would lead to more dense development and essentially more housing overall in the city. It’s changing the face of the city, and to some critics, that’s not where Evanston should go.
So in a way it is “envisioning Evanston,” but it’s also a debate on what Evanston should look like.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: And as recently as last week, we’ve seen residents voice concerns about things like duplexes, changes to these sorts of zoning approaches that prioritize single-family housing, and these are debates that obviously are going to continue over the next few months.
Looking at the pace that this is moving at, there were some councilmembers who said, why do we need a hard stop? There were others who said this idea of a hard stop is important. I asked Mayor Biss about that and again, he returned to this idea of taking bold action.
DANIEL BISS: I’m really pleased to see that we have a schedule that is realistic, that allows us to have extremely significant public input and discussion and still allows us to meet that commitment of getting this work done in the current council.
Government ought to actually take steps to make people’s lives better. And I think frankly, we have a crisis in this country of a lack of faith in government’s ability to act boldly, an ability to act in a way that actually solves the problems we’re experiencing.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: We’ve seen at Monday’s City Council meeting, which both of us were at, that the city approved additional meetings for the Land Use Commission. After those meetings, the idea is that a more concrete draft of the comprehensive plan and the zoning code will be put forth to the council around mid-January, so sometime after the holidays, and the idea was even under the original timeline — and it looks like they’re trying as best as they can to stick to it — that they’re going to vote on this, the council, sometime by March 2025.
SHUN GRAVES: I think it’s also important to note that we’re going into an election season. This is a political process, even if people don’t want to say it. There is a lot riding on this, and Biss is pitching this as the next step for Evanston just as he’s looking for his own next step.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: It is interesting that you say that because I asked Biss explicitly about the political implications of a project like this. He said, you know, vote for Kamala Harris, vote for Tim Walz, vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.
DANIEL BISS: I think we do a disservice to the community by politicizing this whole period of time, and I would hope that we just keep our head down and do our work rather than being in full-on campaign mode.
What I hope voters will do is look at what we’ve accomplished during the course of these four years and determine whether they think they see somebody who’s taken on tough problems and has been willing to do things, not just because they’re easy but because they are necessary.
EDWARD SIMON CRUZ: A lot of the messaging that we’ve heard from Biss so far is, again, reiterating that idea of bold action, of making changes that will serve the future. As you’ve said already, there’s a lot of vagueness to that, especially while we’re still in the stage of trying to figure out, what exactly is the plan going to look like? How is this plan going to address issues of density when it comes to things like housing and parking? Definitely a lot of things to consider here as we move through the next few months, as the process of soliciting community feedback continues.
SHUN GRAVES: And remember the election — the city election — is in early April. That’s a pretty similar timeline to Envision Evanston.
So I think it’s important to see where candidates stake their opinions on this too. It could be a pretty interesting political tack. Daniel Biss is pretty busy with his Democratic Party position in Evanston, of course. But once that’s over and once the campaign season really kicks in, it’s going to be interesting to see where people fall on this.
NARRATOR: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Edward Simon Cruz. Thanks for listening to another episode of Everything Evanston. This episode was reported by me, Edward Simon Cruz.
The city editor of The Daily Northwestern is Shreya Srinivasan. The audio editor is me, Edward Simon Cruz. The digital managing editors are Carlotta Angiolillo and Sasha Draeger-Mazer, and the editor in chief is Jacob Wendler.
Our theme music is “Revolution” by Xennial, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License and provided by the Free Music Archive.
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