EVANSTON’S IDENTITY CRISIS The city approaches new heights – at the cost of its most vulnerable residents and businesses. WRITTEN BY MOLLY GLICK DESIGNED BY AINE DOUGHERTY
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sha Sawhney* hates suburbs. Evanston, she says, is the exception. She grew up in a bright yellow Victorian on one of the city’s lush streets, where precious historic homes hide between swaths of aged trees. “Coexist” signs adorn manicured lawns; it’s the sort of neighborhood you’d expect to see in a John Hughes movie. Sawhney once belonged to those shrill throngs of kids traipsing around Evanston, wandering through Barnes & Noble and World Market until managers toss them out: a suburban rite-of-passage. Now, less than a mile from home, she is finishing her final year at Northwestern. On campus, she watches students judge her terra firma. In fact, Sawhney says the majority of her peers get Evanston wrong. It isn’t just home to SoulCycle groupies and pressed juice zealots. There’s a lot happening right under students’ noses, she says.
“The part of town that Northwestern students equate with Evanston is so miniscule. Downtown is not the only business center,” Sawhney says. “I also feel like a lot of them have the impression that this is a 95 percent white town, which is absolutely not true.” Today, the sites behind some of Sawhney’s favorite childhood romps no longer exist. Evanston is changing at the expense of its historically diverse population of students, middle-class families and residents living below the poverty line. The city, it seems, is shifting away from affordability, becoming yet another upscale, homogeneous suburb. You can see it in the rising rents, new luxury apartments and fad businesses. In these changes, Evanston stands to lose the social consciousness that shaped Sawhney and other students into vocal activists and its status as an education haven for low-income families.
