Talk of the town

Addressing the ongoing pandemic has further strained relations between Northwestern students and Evanston residents.

WRITTEN BY EVA HERSCOWITZ // DESIGNED BY ALISA GAO

This story is part of Unmasked, a special NBN project about Northwestern’s response to the ongoing pandemic. To read the complete project, visit northbynorthwestern.com.

From his seventh floor suite, Dave Davis directs Northwestern University’s “repository for complaints” — or, as it’s formally known, the Office of Neighborhood and Community Relations. Davis is something of a town-gown middleman, serving as the first point of contact for Evanston residents’ concerns regarding the University and ensuring Northwestern community members, including students, are “good neighbors.”

Usually, his job consists of handling resident concerns and fostering partnerships between members of the Northwestern community, Evanston residents and organizations. COVID-19, however, has made Davis’ job much more complicated.

When the quarter began, emails from both older students and Evanston residents reporting student misbehavior flooded Davis's inbox. Noncompliance with mask wearing and social distancing, as well as accounts of large gatherings, were among the most common concerns.

Since mid-October, complaints have slowed to a trickle, but tensions between Evanston residents and students remain, Davis says. The University and the city have clashed before, from Northwestern’s exemption from property taxes to Welsh-Ryan Arena’s potential hosting of forprofit events.

The pandemic has cast further doubt on Northwestern’s role, causing residents to worry about students spreading COVID-19. But it seems for the most part, students are doing their best to act responsibly and safely. With underclassmen permitted to live on campus for winter quarter, residents say they’re balancing their concerns with appreciation for proper student behavior.

“People in the community are concerned about students coming back, as we should be,” says Carol White, an Evanston resident for 28 years. “But I think the community can be all too ready to blame students for things.”

A complicated history

Student behavior during the pandemic isn’t the first controversy regarding the school’s place in Evanston. Property taxes for Illinois residents have risen in recent years, but not for Northwestern; Illinois law exempts land that universities own and use for educational purposes from property taxes. That means the University’s 240 acres on the Evanston lakefront, Ryan Field, Welsh-Ryan Arena and property in Streeterville are all tax exempt — to the detriment of the Evanston community. A 2017 memo suggested that if Northwestern’s property was no longer tax-exempt, it could generate almost $5.9 million a year in additional revenue for the city.

In addition, tensions recently came to a boil over the 7,000-seat Welsh-Ryan Arena. In November 2019, Evanston aldermen approved a temporary zoning amendment allowing the school to host professional sporting and for-profit entertainment events at the arena. Although events remain on hold due to COVID-19, nearby neighbors are concerned the zoning amendment and consequent events would cause disruption.

In an October 2019 statement, 7th Ward Alderman Eleanor Revelle condemned the school’s proposal for its impact on her constituents. “These residents bought their homes with the understanding that the athletic campus was used for collegiate sports and commencement events,” Revelle wrote. “They did not bargain for an additional set of major events attracting a non-collegiate audience with unknown regard for [Northwestern] and its neighbors.”

Still, some residents say Northwestern students, faculty and staff have contributed greatly to the community. The Leadership Development and Community Engagement program, Center for Civic Engagement and #CATSGiveBack initiatives have all sought to embed students into community causes.

Evanston resident Bob Hercules says other than the disruptions that began this summer, his experience with off-campus students has always been positive.

“Northwestern has been a great boon to our economy and to our culture,” he says. “The students, for the most part, have been fantastic. In 24 years, it’s only been this past year that it’s become more and more of an issue.”

Preparing for fall

This fall, as students nationwide prepared to repopulate college towns, a dominant narrative emerged: Students would return to campus, flout safety standards and inevitably transmit COVID-19 to neighbors. At many college campuses nationwide (including fellow Big Ten schools like the University of Iowa), that narrative has certainly seemed to hold true. After students returned to campus, cases from parties spilled into Iowa City, making the mid-size city a pandemic hot-spot.

This summer, as University administrators prepared to bring students back to campus, residents worried about the spread of COVID-19.

“There’s a huge amount of press about what’s going on on [college] campuses,” White says. “Given that that’s a hot topic in the media, and then you live in a university town, it’s going to be a pretty automatic question or concern.”

University administrators hosted a community town hall on Aug. 25 to receive resident feedback about its return-to-campus plan. Three days later, President Morton Schapiro walked back the plans, announcing that first- and secondyear students would no longer be allowed on campus. However, it is unclear to what degree the town hall or resident feedback factored into the decision.

David Schoenfeld serves as a community representative on Northwestern University-City Committee: a special committee comprised of two University representatives, two community representatives and 1st Ward Alderman Judy Fiske. Schoenfeld noticed an uptick in off-campus students returning to Evanston in July. During the summer, many residents worried students’ lax behavior could disrupt community efforts to curb COVID-19 cases.

“I heard from a lot of people who didn’t feel comfortable going to the shops and groceries,” Schoenfeld says. “You didn’t know how well the students were complying with precautions the community had gotten used to abiding by.”

The return to campus

Despite residents’ concerns about student behavior, Northwestern has yet to experience a large-scale COVID-19 outbreak — at least not as to the extent of as many of its peers. As of Nov. 23, the University has reported 525 confirmed COVID-19 cases since March. At the nearby University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 230 community members tested positive in one day.

Hercules’s house is practically embedded in Northwestern’s sprawling campus. Living across the street from the Foster-Walker Complex, he describes students typically housed in Plex as “quiet” and “courteous.” For Hercules, nearby off-campus students hadn’t become disruptive until this summer, but he remains sympathetic to the mindset of young adults. “Students will be students,” he says.

Since Schoenfeld says most students he encounters wear masks, he characterizes the situation in Evanston rationally: “It could be worse.”

For off-campus students, life feels different — and much quieter — in apartments and sidewalks that were once crowded. Aware they’re “outsiders” in Evanston, some students have a heightened sense of respect for their neighbors in terms of COVID-19 precautions, Medill second-year Grayson Welo says. She remains “extra cautious” within her apartment building, wearing her mask constantly and often waiting to ride the elevator alone despite its two-person limit.

“I don’t want to make anyone else feel uncomfortable,” Welo says. “I tend to err on the side of caution.”

Medill second-year Kacee Haslett, who has kept her circle of friends small, says she believes Evanston residents “probably resent us more than we’d like.” Still, her interactions with neighbors have been varied: Multiple adults have thanked her and her friends for wearing masks.

At Northwestern, confirmed cases have remained relatively low. In Evanston, daily active cases were hovering around 362 as of Nov. 23, but as cold weather drives people inside, cases are rising. In some ways, this data may obscure the full story, says White, the longtime Evanston resident. While citywide COVID-19 data includes positive cases among Northwestern community members, the public dashboard doesn’t differentiate between cases among Evanston residents and those among University members.

White has attempted to convince the city to separate the data; she says this breakdown would provide a clearer roadmap for both Northwestern and Evanston officials to implement virus mitigation strategies. However, city officials including Health & Human Services Department Director Ike Ogbo have confirmed the city is not considering differentiating the data for privacy reasons.

“If I saw an Evanston number that said we had 100 new cases, I have concerns that people in the community will say, ‘It’s just because students are back,’” Ogbo says. “But if five of those cases are students and 95 of them are community, this community needs to be woken up.”

Recently, though, both Chicago and Evanston have seen a sharp rise in cases. Between Nov. 13 and 19, Northwestern reported 98 new cases — its highest total yet. White is concerned about the thousands of students currently planning to come to campus in January, though she believes administrators might change their plans.

“Unless there is a drastic change in the country’s case counts, it is completely irresponsible to bring students back in January,” she says. “Anything that encourages that much travel seems completely out of sync with the messages we are getting from the trusted health sources.”

Dealing with complaints

Davis says the office attempts to “get in front” of these issues, and this proactive approach guided its community-wide public health campaign.

At the quarter’s start, University officials dotted the campus with signs reminding students to follow health guidelines and visited offcampus students, knocking on doors and reminding students of COVID-19 behavioral guidelines. Davis says administrators concentrated their visits on students living in “problem homes.”

“Despite some of these efforts, there are still the bad actors, simply because we can't control all of our students and their behavior,” he says. “If we do receive credible reports of the complaints, we certainly will investigate these claims.”

To Schoenfeld, students and residents should shoulder an equal responsibility in keeping the community safe. “Students are adults,” he says. “They better behave like adults.”

But he says Northwestern administrators still aren’t doing enough to encourage compliance among students to health guidelines, such as monitoring offcampus students.

“The University definitely has a responsibility to communicate expectations to students who return,” Schoenfeld says. “They can step up and take responsibility for setting the expectations and enforcing them.”

But when it comes to flouting guidelines, students likely aren’t entirely to blame. Welo says she’s noticed some Evanston residents near her apartment not wearing face coverings in public. From Davis’s walks around Fireman’s Park and the University’s neighborhood, he says “nine times out of 10” students are wearing masks. For now, he’s comfortable with the school’s place in Evanston, he says. With winter quarter presenting the return of thousands of students and a potential uptick in cases, Davis says students have to continue to comply.

“In this moment, I think we're doing a good job,” he says. “It seems like the strategies we put in place to mitigate the spread of COVID are working. But we have to remain vigilant. We can't become complacent. And we'll continue to do the right thing here at the University and in partnership with the Evanston community.”