Rezoning for a Better Evanston, a new not-for-profit in the city, aims to increase homeownership opportunities for Black and middle income residents by legalizing multi-unit housing, co-founder Roger Williams said.
“We’re very much coming at this initially from the perspective of stopping the hemorrhaging of Black residents out of Evanston,” co-founder and 7th Ward resident Frank Hill said.
The Black proportion of the city’s population dropped from 22.5% in 2000 to 14.8% in 2024, Hill said. Citing housing policy experts Richard and Leah Rothstein, Williams said the trend exists because most Black residents are in moderate or middle income brackets, a range for which there are few suitable housing options in Evanston.
Fourth Ward resident Zachary Sanchez-O’Neill said he saw precisely this gap in housing options when he was searching for a home in 2023.
Sanchez-O’Neill said he purchased a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Kansas for around $125,000 in 2012. When his wife was accepted into a medical residency program in Evanston, he thought his family could afford a similar home in the area, he said. Instead, he said, they now live in a small apartment.
“We love our community, and we love our neighborhood. But at this point in our lives, we feel stuck,” Sanchez-O’Neill said. “There’s either a $250,000 apartment, or you wait for a million-dollar house.”
Hill said multi-unit zoning is a “first step” toward correcting the issue. Rezoning for a Better Evanston advocates for relaxing zoning laws across Evanston to allow developments with more than four units, Williams said, because duplexes and triplexes may still be unaffordable for most middle income buyers.
The organization’s website features a computer rendering of a seven-unit condominium, designed to fit with Evanston’s historical district building code, next to single-family homes on a residential block, Hill added.
“It requires creative thinking and problem solving to satisfy the aesthetics of the folks who want single-family homes,” he said. “We don’t need to dispute the aesthetics…Our goal is racial and socioeconomic integration throughout the city of Evanston, and you do that by providing affordable units.”
Williams, a local realtor whose children have graduated from Evanston Township High School, said he became interested in housing reform after entering the real estate business and learning about the history of redlining.
In the mid-20th century, housing policies forced African Americans into the city’s 5th Ward, and banks created a wealth gap by refusing to issue mortgage loans to Black homebuyers, he said.
“It’s an ugly blight on this city’s history,” Williams added.
In the fall of 2024, his push to reduce the impact of redlining led him to attend a training session on advocacy for the city’s heavily debated Envision Evanston 2045 plan hosted by local nonprofit Joining Forces for Affordable Housing. That’s where Williams met Hill, and the pair realized they shared similar views, Hill said.
Loosening zoning laws does not single-handedly make multi-unit housing affordable, Hill said. He referenced pilot programs for shared equity, a property sharing system that would allow residents to take home more equity in a sale than the city’s proposed community trusts, as a potential solution to supplement zoning reform.
Sanchez-O’Neill said living and working in a diverse community like Evanston has been “educational” for him, adding that his children have benefited from going to culturally diverse schools. But with housing prices rising and enrollment in Evanston public schools dropping, he said he worries about that diversity’s future.
“It seems like there are fewer young adults with young kids in our area, and because they can’t afford to live here, they just aren’t taking their kids to school here anymore,” he said. “How can I help people that want to live in Evanston to be able to live in Evanston?”
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