Evanston is going to have a smaller skyline than OakPark in no time with this sort of shit

^ Hah, that was going to be my comment exactly.

Oak Park has been on fire lately. The area immediately around the Harlem Ave Green Line stop has seen significant improvement over the last few years. Very cool stuff. Now if only River Forest would do something about the southwest corner of Harlem/Lake. Forest Park should push some development on Circle/Lake as well. TOD, people!

Green line to Morgan - Evanston just can't offer that - plus we are way cooler than they are.

Sigh.... if only the L had better inter connectivity. In which case all areas would benefit.

I like how the L only benefits very specific areas at a time, makes profiting off of gentrification very easy...

Interconnectivity with what, exactly?

As a former near west suburbanite myself, I completely agree.

:cheers:

Within itself, outside of downtown

nuh-uh.

evanston is literally cooler (by the lake).

:D

^clearly need some spurs off the blue line at this point, to mention just one example, not to mention building an L line over Ashland for N-S

I'm totally okay with Oak Park having a larger skyline than Evanston. We need some height away from the lake.

I do wish Evanston's NIMBY council was a bit less NIMBY-ish though. Skokie has great bones and should aggressively court developers of denied proposals in Evanston. Maybe the Belmont Flyover will open up the possibility of routing the yellow line through the Loop during the rush. The Purple Line could be routed through the State St. subway since the trains have greater capacity and the red line is wall to wall during the rush.

There's quite a bit of NIMBY here in Oak Park too. Unfortunately for them, the village government is hellbent on densification.

^ Good thing for that too. Oak Park has excellent transit connections, with 2 CTA lines and a Metra line. Very lively downtown with lots of foot traffic, easily accessible retail/restaurant options for pedestrians. Really no need for a car if you live there and work in town or the city.

You clearly have spent too much time in Rogers Park if you are using sales pitches from Loyolas marketing campaign.

Only one has the Bahá'í House of Worship... (yeah, it's in Wilmette, whatever).

Evanston could and should be much more than it is today. It's Chicago's mini-me.

suck it, eTown

Maybe oak park will be chicago's Bronx in the next 20 years.

Yeah, I'm sure they'd love that

^ Not while the majority of Oak Park is leafy residential streets with mansions and tidy bungalows and foursquares. The Bronx is orders of magnitude denser than Oak Park will ever be.

The downtown development in Oak Park may boost transit ridership and support more local businesses because of concentration, but it's just a drop in the bucket for the overall density of Oak Park - whose village population has been creeping downward in virtually every census since 1940, despite numerous waves of big developments.

Decreasing family size/increasing average square footage of living space is a bitch. Evanston is also down from its 1960 peak, albeit by not as much as Oak Park. I wonder at the dynamics that have caused the difference in the drop off for both towns.