Blogs

Jeff Smith wrote a letter to the editor that appeared recently in the Evanston RoundTable. I thought it was worth repeating here. It's about two pages long...click 'Read more' to see the complete article.

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"What Evanston Needs (And Doesn't Need)
Editor:

Recently, a community leader asked me, "What do you think Evanston needs?" This huge question can't be answered in one conversation, but looking back at the last few years, here are some starters.

What Evanston needs are more leaders who regard every citizen's concerns as deserving consideration, regardless of their neighborhood. What Evanston does not need are opinion leaders - elected, community or media - who exploit differences between neighborhoods or constituencies, or seek to pit one against another....

Much discussion of Evanston's downtown has invoked a "wedding cake" concept, with the center tallest, and heights lower further out. Mega-growth advocates urge that an extra-tall building on the Fountain Square block will restore a cake-shaped "typical urban form" to downtown, which now allegedly resembles a "fallen soufflé." This is loaded language, meant to shame us as lousy cooks. I'd feel bad, except for one thing: it's nonsense.

First, since 1920, as one official Illinois publication notes,

Gun control arouses passions. But the Evanston City Council made the smart move in voting to modify its handgun ban. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling likely rendered Evanston's ordinance unconstitutional.

Some have argued that, because the Supreme Court case only dealt with Washington, D.C.'s ordinance, and the District of Columbia is not a state, that the reach of the decision is limited, and that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states. That's a risky position to take.

Why in the world would Bill Smith take what appears to be righteous delight in making sweeping generalizations about all Northwest and North East Evanston residents, or for that matter any it seems, any resident who lives in a singe family neighborhood, or who ask questions and demands answers as to what direction the city of Evanston is going in terms of density and planning.

It seems that that Bill thinks it is ok to say things like “density-phobic neighbors” or” status-conscious neighbors” to infer that the residents are somehow neurotic or shallow.

My mini-tour of some of the local condo offerings led to some larger mullings. Altogether, the 4 developments I covered, representing nearly 100 new condos within a 9-iron shot of the Central Street Metra station, raise interesting questions. No doubt all will eventually sell; but at what price? One wonders if the demand for "transit-oriented" luxury condos here hasn’t been overestimated.

A frequent rhetorical trick is to oversimplify an issue, and then present to the audience, factfinder, or decisionmaker a false choice, usually with loaded verbiage. Henry Kissinger was a master of the "we have two choices" overdistillation; Donald Rumsfeld would frequently attempt the same thing by re-phrasing a question into an unpalatable option v. what the Administration was doing.

This tack is what one alderman employed in saying Evanston's only option is to "move forward" or else we "slip backward."