Consultants off-base

I'd like to know when it was decided that downtown Evanston should be comprised of tall buildings crowded together. The consultants' definition of words like "density" was reminiscent of something from George Orwell.
According to them, "density" only applies to residential areas, and tall buildings crowded together is merely a feature of a "downtown" area.

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An Analysis of the Downtown Plan

Some Evanston citizens asked me in the fall to provide a synopsis of the 108-page Downtown Evanston Plan now working its way through the Plan Commission. Since it's going to get a lot closer to reality in the next few months, and we now have a better website, I'm publishing an updated version here. It's a long post but closer to 7 pages, not 108.

Meltdown at Plan Commission

And now this from the Just When You Thought it Couldn't Get Weirder Dept. The regularly-scheduled meeting of the Plan Commission last night (May 14), with about 30 community residents, ended in a fiasco. The Commission is currently at only 8 members due to the resignation of Sara McMurray. Chairman Woods was also absent (after having given a pro-Tower pitch at P&D last Wednesday) as the Commission moved into ch.

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Public Invited to Land Trust Meeting May 18

The Citizens' Lighthouse Community Land Trust will hold its annual meeting 2:00 pm, Sunday, May 18, at the Levy Center, 300 Dodge Ave. Members of the public are invited to attend and to learn more about the land trust model of affordable housing, by which units are made permanently affordable rather than on a one-time basis. The CLCLT is currently marketing a 3-bedroom house at 2212 Washington St. for $180,000 to a qualifying family. For details, click here.

Be Careful What You Ask For

Both by nature and training I tend to look at multiple sides of issues. So, both to try and see if lemonade is extractable from the sour taste of the last Tower vote, and to try and extend some credit to Council members, I stepped back and looked at the punt to the Plan Commission in another light. One way to view it is that residents got, in part, what they asked for.

Tower Remains in Procedural Purgatory

The Focus Development proposed 38-story 708 Church Street project remains in a parliamentary cul-de-sac after no action was taken at the Planning & Development Committee meeting last night, May 12, to remove from "the table" Ald. Wynne's motion to recommend denying the request for the zoning changes necessary to move the project forward (for background on how the matter was tabled to begin with, click here.)

Since the essence of this post is that nothing happened, I will let it go at that.

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Rolanda Russell, New Interim City Manager

Rolanda Russell has been an assistant city manager with Evanston for about 18 months. A native Illinoisan who graduated from SIU, Russell worked on her master’s at Illinois (Champaign) and has a certificate from Harvard’s JFK School of Government for attending a leadership program. After working for 12 years with the public sector in Decatur, Ill., Russell moved to Roanoke, Va. in 2001 and received good reviews for her work as Assistant City Manager for Community Development before leaving to take the Evanston job in 2006.

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