Missing Pieces: An Overview of the Draft Evanston "Housing Plan"

The City of Evanston has propounded a draft Housing Plan. You may wonder why. The City of Evanston, like most cities its size, is not in the business of constructing, selling, managing, or leasing housing as a municipal function. The housing is already built. Lots of it. By the private sector, since the 1840s.

Evanston, less than 8 square miles in area, already is chock full of houses, apartments, and condos, somewhere upwards of 35,000 units, for a population likely approaching 80,000, or about 10,000 people per square mile. By definition, nearly all residents are housed. If you are one of them, already with a roof over your head, you may think the Housing Plan does not apply to you. That is incorrect. An ongoing agenda of a number of City officials and interest groups seeks to alter the entire housing pattern in Evanston to add 10,000-20,000 in population. This requires thoughfully evaluating needs of people who do not presently live here with impacts on residents who do. We are all interconnected in this regard.

However, this draft Plan is open for public input. You are urged to take the survey available here (in English) and here (in Spanish) by end of day Sunday, Oct. 12. It is multiple choice and takes about 5 minutes.

Likely you have not read the 82-page document nor its also-thick groundwork “gap analysis” document. The following are my general observations and comments. Some more specific comments will follow in a separate post, and my reactions to the survey questions are here.

1. This Plan shows more care, sensitivity and nuance than the drafts of Envision Evanston 2045. It is not as blatantly hostile to existing residents. Many parts are "nicer." There are numerous creative ideas worth exploring. Discussion of preservation stands out as thoughtful. It looks, however, like it was drafted by several different persons plus some AI. It still is infused with the neglect of (or disdain for) the normal that plagues EE45. The "no one is more important than anyone else but..." is so close to Animal Farm's "some are more equal than others" it could have been an Onion squib. The credits confirm that there was no outreach to neighborhood resident groups such as ours.

2. Just like EE45, this Plan is not based on sufficient firm knowledge of actual Evanston housing. The City Council and staff have not mapped what housing is located where, have not tracked when it has been built, and supply no figures as to loss from casualty, conversion, or any other cause. The reliance is primarily on census estimates -- not even a firm count, but an algorithm crafted in D.C. (which varies widely from census to census, by as much as thousands) instead of local knowledge of our actual built environment. Obviously, how much if anything a City should do in the field of housing, and where, or evaluating what the effects of what we have already done, depends completely on such explicitly local baseline knowledge. But that foundational work has not been done. That means that much of this document is for the most part unsupported assertions.

3.  The Plan largely avoids the fact that Evanston is a college town. Half of NU undergraduates, and most graduate students, live off campus. The Plan acknowledges this, but the ramifications of that on the housing market -- and, critically, how those thousands of student households skew the "cost-burdened" statistics used to allege a "gap" crisis and drive the entire Plan -- are completely absent.

4. The Plan does not discuss the foundational facts of the market and submarkets for Evanston housing. Why is Evanston expensive? Has that changed over time? How? What has caused changes? Just like EE45, there is scant examination of the drivers of demand, which have been increasing or decreasing, or how demographic or cultural or economic changes have impacted who is buying or renting what. These are not discussed except obliquely on pp. 57-58, in a history that is not as terrible as that in the draft comprehensive plan, but which is still embarrassingly incomplete. A "history" of Evanston housing that does not mention the massively transformational adoption of zoning a century ago can't be taken seriously.

5. The Plan does not discuss important questions of the relative roles of the market v. government engineering. What should that balance be? To what degree do we want to substitute the judgment of five aldermen for that of families, homebuyers, sellers, landlords, renters? How much freedom in real estate decisions do we want to allow or to eliminate? What is fair to existing homeowners? These are not discussed. A statement is made simply asserting City authority. I've never been accused of being a laissez-faire free-marketer, but in a mixed economy in a time of government overreach, these are important questions.

6. The Plan shifts back and forth between the concept of “affordability” and the more slippery “attainability.”

7. The Plan obsessively focuses on a “30% rule” for affordability. This metric was invented in the 1960s. It has not been realistic for many households, maybe most, since housing began drastically outpacing incomes in the 1980s as the baby Boom entered its heavy housebuying years in the Reagan era of increasing inequality. It is ironic that a City that claims a zoning Code drafted in 1993 and updated over a hundred times since is obsolete simply because of age, but that a 60-year-old guideline should be an iron metric. The 30% guideline has little applicability in a place where people move to and live already knowing that it is expensive, as has been true since the 19th century. A 30% metric also has little applicability either to the many Evanstonians for whom the remaining 70% is still a very comfortable figure by American standards, or to students who do not have the same costs as working adults and parents. Finally, the use of only this figure ignores that Evanston is full of many people who made a conscious decision to pay a premium to locate here and in their specific neighborhood for what the community and their neighborhood has been and is.

8. The Plan ignores the idea of fairness to existing residents, which is fundamental to planning and zoning, and to whom the primary duty of local government is owed. It is not discussed at all. It is the epitome of inequity and unfairness to pull a bait-and-switch especially on homeowners, who cannot move with enormous transaction costs, and say “we are going to take away what you paid a premium for,” especially to benefit non-residents and third parties.

9. The Plan largely ignores that Evanston is not a closed system or a walled city, but is part of a metropolitan region. No one can limit people outside Evanston from buying or trying to rent here. No one wants to , that I know of. But everything has limits, and attempts to manipulate outcomes by manipulating supply through government intervention are unlikely to succeed and may even backfire. Especially when new housing is more expensive to build than ever. The character of a community is also more than a slogan, it is the essence of self-determination andf self-government.

10. The Plan ignores the massive generational transformation coming. Easily a 5,000-person increase in population is going to happen in Evanston even if not one additional unit is built, due to turnover of empty nests. The Plan says, somewhat disingenuously, that “some” current older owners may move out. That is amazing understatement. Everything that the Baby Boom, the largest cohort America has ever seen, has experienced occurred en masse, a struggle that that generation, especially the latter half of it, has had to contend with their whole lives. The transition from independent living and homeownership will be no different. It will accelerate dramatically over the next 5-10 years. The looming unaddressed housing shortfall is in places for people to age.

11. The Plan skirts over the fact that more of Evanston housing is already subsidized than in almost any other suburb, and that according to IHDA figures, more housing in Evanston is already considered affordable than in our neighbors.

12. The Plan does not discuss property taxes or land value. It alludes to "rising land value" once as a factor in "displacement," but that sole nod is disconnected from all other strategies.

13. There is no estimate of what any measure would cost, who would bear the costs, nor any effort to quantify the effects of any measure. No one can seriously be asked to evaluate and approve or disapprove of any "strategy" measure if there is not even a scintilla of cost-benefit analysis. Would you say yes to buying a car without knowing its pricetag, how much it can carry, and what mileage it gets? But that is what the survey in effect asks.

So my answers to the survey have all of the above as a huge asterisk. However, if ordinary residents do not take the survey, its results will be dominated by a coordinated lobbying effort that is in reality ongoing and that will be heralded as "what we heard." So take the survey.