Neighbors mixed on proposed Evanston tower that would rival suburbs' tallest buildings
The proposed residential tower would have the same number of floors as suburban Chicago's tallest building, Oakbrook Terrace Tower in DuPage County, though that building rises 418 feet, according to information from Shawn Ursini of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
The proposed highrise, which aligns with Mayor Daniel Biss' goal to increase housing density in Evanston, is also notable becuse it includes dramatically fewer parking spaces than is typical for the suburbs. There would be 80 on-site spaces for 445 apartments. The developer suggested using an estimated 120 parking spots in nearby city-owned garages, but so far that remains only a suggestion.
Representatives from Chicago based co-developers Vermilion Development and Campbell Coyle shared with neighbors proposals of their 605 Davis Street high rise, at the northwest corner of Davis Street and Chicago Avenue, at a ward meeting on April 29. The developers anticipate the development, on two currently vacant lots, will also help the city's goal of raising property tax revenue for the land parcels by millions of dollars.
The proposed building's height would put it under the suburbs' second-tallest building, Two Pierce Plaza in Itasca, at 395 feet, but much taller than Evanston's existing tallest buildings: Orrington Plaza at 277 feet, Sherman Plaza at 276 feet, Optima Views at 265 feet and One Rotary Center at 237 feet tall, per information from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
The community meeting, hosted by Councilmembers Clare Kelly (1st) and Jonathan Nieuwsma (4th), was attended by about 50 residents at the main branch of the Evanston Public Library. The majority of residents offered a mix of reasons as to why the project should not move forward, including parking troubles, traffic troubles and a potential 'wind tunnel' effect that could strengthen winds, making downtown harder for pedestrians to walk.
The project had some support at the meeting from Evanston's commercial partners. 'We should be welcoming this type of development. We should be working with them,' said Andy Vick, the executive director of the Downtown Evanston Merchants Organization.
Evanston resident Tina Paden said the development will not benefit most Evanstonians, particularly Black families.
'Let's be real, that this building is for Northwestern students,' she said. 'I live down the street from (housing developments) E2 and The Link. I do not see Black families with three or four children walking out of the building. They are Northwestern students. You are coming here for opportunity to make big, giant dollars from Northwestern students. You do not care about Evanston residents.'
As proposed by developers, the building's 445 residential units will mostly be studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units, according to Dickson. The development is proposed to have 20%, or 89, of them marketed as affordable units, which is 5% more than the city's inclusionary housing ordinance requires.
Plans call for the development to have three storefronts. Luay Aboona, principal at traffic consulting firm KLOA, Inc., said the development is not likely to increase traffic in a significant way in the immediate area of the development.
Kerry Dickson, managing director of Vermilion Development, said the developers hope to negotiate a lease with city-owned parking lots on Church Street and Davis Street for residents to park their vehicles there. The city could net an additional $172,000 in renting out parking spaces needed by the development's residents, he said, estimating that an additional 120 vehicles will need parking.
Dickson said the site at 605-609 Davis Street now houses two vacant lots and is in blighted condition.
The Davis Street development isn't the only high rise project in the works in Evanston. Last September, two developers proposed a 27-story apartment building also in the downtown area at the current Church Street Plaza. That development is anticipated to have 358 units, and is also asking the city for variances in its zoning code to have a lower number of parking spaces.
Property tax breaks
Jonathan Perman of Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications, a spokesperson hired to represent the development, said that because the 605 Davis Street development offers 20% of its units to be rented at an affordable rate, a state statute makes discounts available in the developer's property tax bill.
Called Affordable Illinois when it was signed into law by Gov. JB Pritzker in 2021, the state law makes housing developments in certain areas of Cook County eligible for a significant property tax break, in the form of lowered assessments, available for 30 years, as long as they also provide 20% of their housing units to be rented at affordable rates, among other requirements.
For the first 12 years after the development is complete, the building owner will pay 60% or less of the building's assessed property tax value. For the 18 years after that, they will pay 80% of the assessed value. After that time period is over, the property tax bill must be paid in its entirety.
At the meeting, Councilmember Kelly said the 30 years of property tax discounts would essentially be a forfeiture from the city to the developer.
Perman took a different emphasis, characterizing the property tax bill the developers will be paying, stating that after 12 years, the city of Evanston would be reaping an estimated $2.7 million instead of the $21,450 it is getting now for the undeveloped property.
.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
8 hours ago
'Highballed': How disproportionate property taxes are forcing some Americans out of their homes
Bonita Anderson's favorite part of living in Baltimore is having family nearby. A family matriarch with five children and eight grandchildren, Anderson worked hard to buy a place in the city for her family to call home in 2009. "It was an accomplishment for me," she said. "That's where we used to gather to bring the family together." Last week, what was once Anderson's cherished home was listed for sale at nearly $540,000 -- more than five times what she paid for it. But Anderson won't see any of the proceeds. After more than a decade of making payments toward her $100,000 mortgage, Anderson was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. Amid mounting medical bills and property taxes, the lifelong Baltimore resident says she had to choose between fighting for her life and fighting for her home. While undergoing treatment, Anderson fell behind on her property taxes by about $5,000. In 2022, she lost her house at a Baltimore City tax sale. "I sat down and thought, 'Oh my god, I'm 70 years old and I'm homeless,'" Anderson told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott. The City of Baltimore had put a lien on Anderson's tax debt and auctioned it off to the highest bidder -- a company that specializes in tax lien purchases -- for just $69,500. "If you can't afford to pay your property taxes and you keep missing your payments, government is going to auction your property off for back taxes," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean at the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. Court records show Anderson tried to make good and redeem her home, paying the city $18,900 by the end of 2022 -- more than triple her outstanding taxes. But instead of putting these payments toward her back taxes, the city applied the money to taxes that had accrued under the new owner. Anderson was unknowingly paying the investor's tax bills instead of her own, allowing the company to foreclose on her home in 2023. "I was just baffled," she said. 'Filled with distortions' Anderson's home was just one of nearly 44,000 Baltimore properties that were listed at municipal tax sales from 2019 through 2023. It was also among the 92% of those properties located in majority-nonwhite neighborhoods -- which account for 70% of parcels citywide. An analysis of ATTOM and U.S. Census Bureau data by ABC Owned Television Stations showed one likely reason for this disparity: disproportionate property taxes. Property taxes are based on a government assessment of each home's value. But researchers say property values are highly subjective, and these estimates don't always align with market prices. Data shows discrepancies in assessments -- and therefore tax bills -- affect some communities more than others. ABC's analysis found that across the country, homeowners in predominantly Black and Brown areas tend to pay higher taxes than those in mostly white neighborhoods for a house worth the same amount on the open market. "When property tax systems are filled with distortions the people punished tend to be the poorest homeowners," Levy said. "In suburbia, where you have a high level of segregation, the people who are being taxed unfairly based on not accurately capturing the value of the home are people of color." For some of these homeowners who are "highballed" on their assessments, missed bills lead to tax sales, leaving them with nothing. From the time Anderson bought her home until she lost it, the property's assessment more than tripled -- but the home's booming value ultimately went to its new owner. "I don't know what's worse, losing the house or being diagnosed with cancer," Anderson said. "It hurts still." Until recently, Levy noted, tax sales most often took place in cities. As urban neighborhoods gentrified and property values shifted rapidly, longtime residents couldn't always keep up with rising bills. "We're now starting to see more of that in suburban areas, particularly in the poorer suburban areas as we're seeing demographic change," Levy said. In Garden City, a predominantly white suburb on New York's Long Island with a median home value of around $1 million, a typical residential tax bill is around $10,000 to $15,000, property data shows. Down the road in Hempstead, where 88% of residents are Black or Latino, homes tend to be worth less than half that. But the typical tax bill is similar, meaning Hempstead homeowners pay proportionally more in taxes relative to the value of their homes. John Rao, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, says U.S. homeowners in communities of color face a "double whammy." They often receive "lowballed" appraisals when trying to purchase or refinance their homes, Rao explained, "but when it comes to paying their taxes, once they've owned the home ... often their assessments are proportionally higher than what they should be." 'Stripping generational wealth' In suburban Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 91-year-old Gloria Gaynor, who suffers from dementia, lost her home of 25 years because of $3,500 in taxes she didn't pay during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gaynor's daughter, Jackie Davis, told ABC station WPVI-TV that her mother stayed home during the pandemic. She skipped her annual trip to the tax office after hearing that tax collectors had paused enforcement as COVID-19 spread through the Philadelphia suburbs. When the government restarted collection efforts and the county tax office reopened, Gaynor went in and made a payment, intending to cover her previous year's taxes, according to her attorney, Alexander Barth. Instead, the money was applied to Gaynor's 2021 and 2022 taxes and not her outstanding balance from 2020, "leaving what is essentially a donut in her tax payment history," Barth explained. A real estate investor bought Gaynor's home from Delaware County for $14,000, the cost of her overdue taxes plus interest and fees. Gaynor had paid off most of her mortgage on the house, which is now worth an estimated $247,000. But she did not make any money from the sale. "This is stripping generational wealth from the have-nots and allowing the haves to have it," Barth said. Gaynor's family went to court in an attempt to get back her home, but two courts upheld the sale. The Delaware County Tax Claim Bureau told ABC's Philadelphia station that while it "sympathizes with the emotional toll" on Gaynor, the county government acted within Pennsylvania law and issued multiple notices ahead of the sale. If Gaynor had lived just a few miles away inside Philadelphia's city limits, officials there would have taken extra steps to try to keep her in her home. Since property taxes are handled differently in different communities, some local governments like Philadelphia have layers of protection for vulnerable homeowners, such as requiring in-person notifications before a tax sale or offering payment plans to redeem a home afterward. "Although local governments should do everything they can to keep people in their homes, whether it's an owner or a renter, at some point they have an obligation to all the other taxpayers, the businesses, the families that are paying their fair share to make sure that these taxes are collected," Levy said. From the living room to the courtroom Just over 90 miles down the road from Gaynor, Anderson spends her days looking back on the memories she built in the home that was once the centerpiece of her family. Now living with her daughter in a Baltimore suburb, Anderson has taken her case to court, joining a lawsuit claiming that the City of Baltimore broke federal law by selling her former home to a private company for pennies on the dollar. The City of Baltimore, which did not respond to ABC News' requests for comment, has defended its actions in court, saying it notified Anderson as required and did not profit from the sale. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local governments could not profit from tax sales, finding that homeowners have a constitutional right to any payments beyond the taxes and penalties they owe. Over the last two years, many states across the country have changed their laws in light of the court's decision. But some experts say the federal government also has a role to play. "The federal answer to lower local property taxes is more funding for local services," Levy said. "They need more help from Congress and the White House." As the Trump administration has slashed the federal budget, local governments will have to make up the difference to provide the same services. According to experts, municipalities will likely rely more on property taxes, which in turn, could mean more situations like Anderson's, where homeowners in majority-nonwhite neighborhoods too often pay more than their fair share. When asked by ABC News what happened to her dream of passing down her home to the next generation of her family, Anderson said, "it died." "It still makes me emotional," Anderson said. "It's just hard. Very hard."
Business Insider
9 hours ago
- Business Insider
Married childfree millennials have a $120,000 net worth advantage
A Business Insider analysis of new data from the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation finds that millennials who are married, but don't have children under 18 in the household, are sitting on net worths that exceed those of their parental, single, and divorced peers. It's yet another point in favor of what's fast becoming a new version of the American dream: Living in a high-earning household without kids. Many of those high-net-worth millennials are likely DINKs, meaning that they're in dual-income households with no kids. Others may have arrangements like stay-at-home husbands or wives, where the couple is able to comfortably live off one earner. This data is based on the most recent release of SIPP data; we looked at data from December 2023, which was the last month recipients were surveyed for this wave. We separated out Americans who were married, not a reference parent for any household children under 18, and then sorted by those who were ages 27 to 42 — the age bounds of millennials during the survey period. Childfree and married millennials had a few demographic differences from the larger millennial cohort. They were, for instance, more likely to have a bachelor's degree or a post-graduate degree. Married and childfree millennials were also more likely to be white than the wider millennial cohort, and far less likely to be Black. There were also some key economic differences between married and childfree millennials and the larger millennial group; married and childfree millennials had on average slightly more credit card debt, carrying around $2,456 compared to $2,203 for all millennials. But married and childfree millennials were also more likely to have money socked away for retirement — the average value of their retirement accounts was around $71,886, which far exceeds the $48,408 of the average millennial's retirement accounts. Of course, not all married and childfree millennials are sitting on large net worths. The net worths represent an average across the group, meaning a swath of married and childfree millennials have far less in the bank. Some married and childfree Americans don't want to be in that position — as Business Insider has previously reported, one subset of DINKs would like to have children, but can't afford it, struggle with infertility and uncertainty over family planning, or are turned off by the lack of support for parents in the US. It's also entirely possible that some of those surveyed millennials are biding their time and waiting to have children later in life, a rising trend among some in their generation. There's also another barrier for childfree and married millennials, who are already paying on average around $3,447 in rent or mortgage — the US just doesn't have the housing to accommodate a potentially growing family. Even so, the numbers show it's paying for some millennials to get hitched, but not add to their families. And as Gen Zers think about their futures, financial security is top of mind, while growing their families isn't as high a priority — indicating that the ranks of the financially secure and childfree might only grow.
Business Insider
9 hours ago
- Business Insider
Married childfree millennials have a $120,000 net worth advantage
It turns out that some millennials have been able to get ahead — they just had to put a ring on it, while holding off on having kids. A Business Insider analysis of new data from the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation finds that millennials who are married, but don't have children under 18 in the household, are sitting on net worths that exceed those of their parental, single, and divorced peers. It's yet another point in favor of what's fast becoming a new version of the American dream: Living in a high-earning household without kids. Many of those high-net-worth millennials are likely DINKs, meaning that they're in dual-income households with no kids. Others may have arrangements like stay-at-home husbands or wives, where the couple is able to comfortably live off one earner. This data is based on the most recent release of SIPP data; we looked at data from December 2023, which was the last month recipients were surveyed for this wave. We separated out Americans who were married, not a reference parent for any household children under 18, and then sorted by those who were ages 27 to 42 — the age bounds of millennials during the survey period. Childfree and married millennials had a few demographic differences from the larger millennial cohort. They were, for instance, more likely to have a bachelor's degree or a post-graduate degree. Married and childfree millennials were also more likely to be white than the wider millennial cohort, and far less likely to be Black. There were also some key economic differences between married and childfree millennials and the larger millennial group; married and childfree millennials had on average slightly more credit card debt, carrying around $2,456 compared to $2,203 for all millennials. But married and childfree millennials were also more likely to have money socked away for retirement — the average value of their retirement accounts was around $71,886, which far exceeds the $48,408 of the average millennial's retirement accounts. Of course, not all married and childfree millennials are sitting on large net worths. The net worths represent an average across the group, meaning a swath of married and childfree millennials have far less in the bank. Some married and childfree Americans don't want to be in that position — as Business Insider has previously reported, one subset of DINKs would like to have children, but can't afford it, struggle with infertility and uncertainty over family planning, or are turned off by the lack of support for parents in the US. It's also entirely possible that some of those surveyed millennials are biding their time and waiting to have children later in life, a rising trend among some in their generation. There's also another barrier for childfree and married millennials, who are already paying on average around $3,447 in rent or mortgage — the US just doesn't have the housing to accommodate a potentially growing family. Even so, the numbers show it's paying for some millennials to get hitched, but not add to their families. And as Gen Zers think about their futures, financial security is top of mind, while growing their families isn't as high a priority — indicating that the ranks of the financially secure and childfree might only grow.
