What is the rollercoaster that is Envision Evanston 2045? What does Trump’s potential travel ban mean for Northwestern’s international students? The Daily answers these questions and recaps other top stories from the last week.

ANAVI PRAKASH: The first story from The Daily’s features desk dives into the next installment of the chronicles of Envision Evanston 2045.

And Trump’s potential travel ban raises the stakes for international students. 

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Anavi Prakash. 

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: And I’m Dov Weinstein Elul. This is The Weekly, a breakdown of the top headlines from the past week.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Envision Evanston 2045 has been the topic of conversation since last February when it was publicly announced. Since then, the comprehensive plan and zoning code have gone through trials and tribulations, which City Editor Shun Graves highlights in The Daily’s inaugural feature story. 

Here’s Dov with the inside look.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Before delving into the first feature article, I spoke to Jake Epstein, the first Features Editor about what the new desk is and what readers can expect from it. 

So, just tell me a little bit about how this desk came about. Why is it important for The Daily to have something like the features desk? 

JAKE EPSTEIN: Well, you know, it was an idea from our new EIC, Lily Ogburn. And what we really wanted was sort of an intermediary between these expansive, long, investigative pieces that we produce one or two a quarter that are the In Focus desk, which they do great work. Shout out [Medill junior] William Tong and [Medill junior] Aidan Johnstone, our two In Focus editors this quarter. 

But what I really wanted to focus on with this desk is producing an avenue for writers to sort of go beyond the word counts that come with day-to-day reporting. And what this desk functions to do is really allow for a little more creativity, a little more expansion in pretty much all of our desks, so we have sports coverage, we can do A&E. We’ve done city already with Shun’s first feature. We’ll have sports coming in next week as well, campus. I mean, there’s just so many different avenues for reporters to really delve into some deep reporting. And I’m excited to sort of guide a lot of our staffers through what are some of their first features, but a lot of them have written them before. And you know, it’s a desk that welcomes writers of all experience levels, and I’m just excited to be creating a welcoming environment for all of our staffers.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Jake, thank you so much.

Next, I spoke to Shun Graves, who published the first features article on Wednesday about delays to Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss’s Envision Evanston plan, after he received backlash from political opponents and Evanston residents.

So you took on this topic of Mayor Daniel Biss and Envision Evanston. Envision Evanston is a massive plan to change the city of Evanston in many facets, from affordability to sustainability. If I understand it correctly, residents are upset with both some of the proposals that Mayor Biss is proposing and at the haste at which they’re being pushed through, and this was sort of central to your story. 

Can you expand a bit on that and explain what these proposals are and why they’re being pushed through so fast? 

SHUN GRAVES: Yeah, well, Envision Evanston 2045 is sort of a vision by the city for how it should look, what kind of policies it should have in place over the next 20 years. That takes the form of a comprehensive plan, which is, sort of, a guiding document for city policy and for Evanston, also a zoning rewrite.

Now, what is a zoning rewrite? What does zoning do? Well, zoning, at the most basic level, is essentially a set of rules that says you can build this much or this kind of building in this part of town. So, for example, you can’t just go out in the middle of a bunch of single family flats and build a huge tower. There are different requirements for different neighborhoods and for what buildings can be used for. So that’s what they’re trying to do, the city that is, is to rewrite the zoning code and essentially allow more housing to be built in the city. That’s the most simplest explanation. 

Now, why are people upset about Envision Evanston? Well, they are for several reasons. Mayor Biss has maintained that any impacts from the zoning rewrite would take place over the course of several years. It would not be immediate. But what residents fear is that by eliminating single family zoning, which is a very core tenet of a lot of zoning around the United States, [the city] would allow pricey developers to come in and develop up to fourplexes in these quiet neighborhoods and potentially kick out longtime residents in some of the city’s poorer areas as well. So that’s the main argument against the single family zoning. There are also a lot of arguments against the increased density, essentially allowing a tower of any height to be built in certain parts of downtown Evanston, with some conditions. Those are the arguments against the rezoning. 

But what really got people going was how this process was going by really quickly. Mayor Daniel Biss inaugurated the whole public process last February, February 2024, and the city, with its consultant, HDR, and Mayor Daniel Biss had been pushing for a March of this year deadline for adopting both the comprehensive plan and the zoning rewrite. So all of that had to be talked about with the public, finalized, put into action by, well at least adopted by, March. People were upset that it was really, really quick, and very few places tried to tackle both the comprehensive plan and a zoning rewrite at the same time. So people were really flustered with why all of this was happening at once. They wanted more time to talk about it. 

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Why is all this happening at once? 

SHUN GRAVES: Well, I asked Mayor Daniel Biss this and he’s, for a very long time, he’s pushed this idea of bold, “urgent” action. He says that the city needs to take immediate steps to remedy affordability problems, to improve whatever other range of issues in the city, and he said that Envision Evanston is a way to tackle all of these priorities at once. And not only that, he wanted the process at least until, until recently, had wanted the process to wrap up by March. 

He said he was essentially not comfortable having it happen in April, which is when the municipal election is happening, when Daniel Biss, by the way, is running for reelection, and some of the months after it. So that was his argument for it — that these are pressing problems that we must tackle, and we have an excellent opportunity to tackle everything at once. Of course, that brings a lot of different concerns about how can you be careful about all these different things if you’re doing them all at once and on such a short timeline?

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: So he did back down in some regards. Can you explain this to me, and what actions did the residents take to cause him to back down? 

SHUN GRAVES: It’s hard to explain without seeing it, I guess, politically, because Daniel Biss’ opponents say that he was dealt a defeat at City Council on Monday because City Council decided to split Envision Evanston’s comprehensive plan and rezoning processes into two, and the rezoning part, the most controversial part, is not, probably not going to be adopted until August. So this was in direct contravention to what Daniel Biss had pushed for for a long time. 

However, the mayor applauded the council, and people who have observed him for a while said he probably calculated that that was the politically clever move in terms of how to handle this. Ultimately, he’s saying that, by this decision, the council showed that this process is actually being responsive to residents. Now, a lot of residents disagree. They see council as being the check on Daniel Biss’s vision, and it’s hard to say what kind of implications this will have on the mayoral race that’s going forward soon, and it’ll take a little bit of time to see what will transpire with Envision Evanston, because it’s still very controversial, even though the timeline has been extended.

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: Shun, thank you so much.

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Next, we have Assistant Campus Editor Alexia Sextou speaking about what a travel ban means for Northwestern’s international student population. 

In light of President Trump’s inauguration, there are a lot of questions in the air about a potential travel ban he alluded to on the campaign trail. Some universities encouraged their international students to come back to the U.S. before Inauguration Day — just in case.

NU began classes on Jan. 6, which is a few weeks before Trump was inaugurated, so the University did not issue such a statement. 

Despite this, how has a possible travel ban impacted NU students? What is going through their head right now?

ALEXIA SEXTOU: So I want to flag up top that there isn’t a fixed plan for there to be a reintroduction of the travel ban. President Trump has said that it is likely he would bring it back. He said that throughout his 2024 campaign, and it is likely to happen. A lot of universities started warning their students in advance in case this happens. So this is all provisional at the end of the day, in terms of suggestions from schools, but also in terms of fears and changing plans. 

I think the way that we take this into account when we’re interviewing for a story like this, because international students is such a wide variety and diversity of people, we try to get pools of people from different parts of the world. So I tried to interview people from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but also from Latin America. And obviously the feelings and emotions change based on the geographical location that you’re from, simply because President Trump’s policies in 2017 did affect specific countries from specific parts of the world. 

So students from Europe, specifically, they did generally believe that it’s quite unpredictable as a time now, but for some of them, for example, a student who is currently a Belarusian citizen, she said that this isn’t really the only factor that she’s considering when it comes to altering her travel plans or the things she’s worried about. So for European students, mostly, yes, they did, for example, use the word “concerned,” but not to as much a large degree as other students. 

Now, students from more Asian countries or Middle Eastern countries, such as Syria or Iran, did say they felt anxious. Students said that they felt fear and worry as well. This makes sense if we look at the countries that were previously affected by Trump’s ban in 2017 and then in 2020 because Syria and Iran were part of the Travel Ban 3.0 countries, which was eventually overturned by President Biden in 2021, but insofar as Trump’s last term is relevant here, then Middle Eastern students definitely feel this effect a lot more strongly, just because they’ve seen this happen to them before. 

And what this translates into is just higher difficulty at the border. So, currently, obviously international students are on an F-1 visa status. This means that they’ve been granted maybe four or five years to remain in the U.S. But, obviously, security is very, very strict, obviously at the border, it makes a lot of sense. 

But what students from the Middle East were worried about is that this is going to become even more difficult when it comes to traveling back home and then returning to the United States. Specifically, an Iranian student shared her experience with me by explaining that she was questioned at the border for quite some time. She was there for five hours, and there were a lot of personal questions that she had to answer about why she’s entering the United States. And she did say that she felt fear and concern about this, that it might get worse, and at the same time, she said it felt kind of unnecessary to some degree, because she’s also a dual citizen, which means that she’s not just from Iran, she’s also someone with a Canadian passport, which is not a country that was previously impacted by the ban. 

And then in terms of Latin America, I did speak to a Brazilian student. He said that while the ban didn’t affect his country during Trump’s last term, he did feel that it would impact his sense of belonging and safety at NU, and he said that actually, he’s already starting to feel the effects of that.

ANAVI PRAKASH: And in the long term, what courses of action are students looking at taking if a travel ban does occur? 

ALEXIA SEXTOU: A lot of students, because of that potential ban, are changing their plans for whether they are going to return back home or not, not just for the summer, but also within the whole four years. I spoke to the student from Syria, and he said that he is actually not going to return back home to Syria at all within his four years of studying at NU because Syrian visas — student visas — are only granted for 90 days, which means that you get your U.S. visa in Syria, you come to the U.S., but within 90 days it expires. So what you would have to do is that you would have to travel back to Syria to renew it, but with a potential new travel ban, there’s no guarantee that his visa would be renewed, and there’s no guarantee that he would be able to re-enter the country, which is why he said that he’d rather sort of “lay low,” is what he said, and not pursue returning to Syria. 

This also affected not just travel plans in terms of going back home, but also potential study abroad programs and other opportunities. He’s also a Medill student, which means that a lot of programs that are offered on campus are just not an option for him, out of the fear and worry that, you know, he might have visa difficulties within the four years that he’s allowed to stay here.

ANAVI PRAKASH: Based on what students told you, are there any long-term implications to the potential travel ban?

ALEXIA SEXTOU: Every single student that I spoke to, who is international, for this story, said that they feel that this might impact the amount of students that we might see coming to United States’ universities and specifically to NU as well, because, yes, a school might be willing to grant a space to international students, absolutely, and that’s great, but at the same time, if those students are having difficulties acquiring visas or are having difficulties traveling or getting tickets or entering the border, then, what’s a place in a school going to do if you actually can’t travel there and you can’t remain the four years?

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ANAVI PRAKASH: Thanks so much, Alexia. Here are the other top headlines from the week: 

Evanston Labs concludes construction and signs COUR Pharmaceuticals as its first tenant.

2 NU students raise over $5,000 for Los Angeles wildfire efforts.

Men’s basketball earns its first win of the new year in overtime against Maryland.

The Overtime group combines sports, improv and competition,

And the University plans to review its budget model for the first time in 20 years.

From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Anavi Prakash. 

DOV WEINSTEIN ELUL: And I’m Dov Weinstein Elul. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Weekly. 

ANAVI PRAKASH: This episode was reported by Anavi Prakash, Dov Weinstein Elul, Jake Epstein, Shun Graves and Alexia Sextou and produced by Anavi Prakash and Dov Weinstein Elul.

The Audio Editor is Anavi Prakash. The Multimedia Managing Editors are Kelley Lu and Jillian Moore. The Editor in Chief is Lily Ogburn.

Our theme music is “Night Owl” by Broke for Free, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License and provided by the Free Music Archive.

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