Why the Answer to Slow Government Isn't to Give Up

As I staggered into my house well past midnight at the end of Monday’s seemingly endless City Council meeting, I had several different feelings all at once: relief, but also a somber awareness of how much work is still to come.

After many hours of consideration of more than 60 amendments, the Evanston City Council passed Housing4All, our strategic housing plan which lays the groundwork for creating more affordable housing across our community. (And even though much of the discussion was contentious, we passed it on a 7-2 vote!)

Evanston has no higher priority than housing – making sure that residents who want to stay can afford to do so, retaining the diversity that makes us vibrant, and welcoming more people to make our community even stronger. The passage of this plan, which includes many strategies to support homeowners and renters alike, while laying the foundation to change our zoning code and work towards increasing that “missing middle” of housing stock, is a big deal.

At the same time, it’s daunting to think of how much farther we have to go. Years ago, as this process was launching, my hope was that we’d be done by March – of 2025! Even once the zoning changes are enacted, it will take years to generate the duplexes and other multi-unit structures Evanston needs.

Relaxing zoning is just one of many strategies we need to deploy. An effective housing plan must include zoning reform alongside rental assistance, stronger regulation of landlords, support for existing homeowners, and a long list of other strategies we’ll need to keep adding to. Housing4All takes this list of ideas and refines them into a vision we can pursue together.

We have a political system that too often listens to the loudest most-resourced voices. And sometimes all that fighting can make it feel like nothing is ever going to change. But the answer isn’t to give up because progress is incremental. That’s what the loudest opponents want. They think if they create enough friction, we’ll move on to something easier.

The long road to this point has taught me a few important lessons. The first is patience. Yes, this is all taking far longer than I hoped. But that’s because we’ve seen a genuine desire on the part of many residents to have more input and discussion, which necessitated slowing down. The upside of this is that we have far more community engagement and input than we would have had everything passed 14 months ago.

This brings me to the second big takeaway: the power of organizing. Through this process, new organizations have sprung into existence as Evanstonians have engaged with these issues and decided to take action. These newcomers have joined existing entities like Joining Forces for Affordable Housing, Connections for the Homeless, Open Communities, and The Evanston Transit alliance to build a formidable coalition for change.

The irony is that while opponents of reform thought they would win by causing delays, instead they’ve created the conditions for more durable change that will ultimately get us further. The changes we need to enact may spread over the terms of multiple mayors, but more importantly, they’ll be designed by our whole broad, diverse, creative community.

That’s a great thing: when our community is involved, we all win.

So that’s what I’m asking of you, too. Keep showing up. Keep talking to your neighbors. Keep building support and consensus — one conversation, one meeting, one vote at a time — for the changes we need.

Evanston is at its best when we are socioeconomically diverse. That’s what makes our schools better, our small businesses stronger, our culture richer, and our civic life more engaged. And it’s exactly what we are losing, year after year, as housing costs climb and the people who built this community get priced out of it.

This vote is a big win for the city. It isn’t everything we need, but the good news is we’re just getting started.

—Daniel