While Evanstonians have been cheering — or bemoaning — the construction of new housing downtown, shrinkage in the existing downtown housing stock has gone relatively unnoticed.
U.S. Census figures, gathered in a city report after the 1990 census, appear to show at least 2,842 housing units in what is now considered downtown Evanston.
After construction of 313 new housing units in the late 1990s, the 2000 census showed that downtown Evanston within its current boundaries had 2,771 housing units — 71 less than a decade earlier.
The downtown plan now under debate pays a lot of attention to new buildings that have gone up recently, planned buildings already approved, and what the city should do to direct possible future development.
But it says not a word about existing housing units that may have been lost since 2000 or that may disappear over the life of the new plan.
That’s understandable. The new projects tend to be big and highly controversial. And many of them have been built on what had most recently been parking lots.
But older buildings tend not to last forever, and to get a full picture of the supply of and demand for downtown housing a look at housing unit losses since 2000 should be part of the mix. It would be a shame if we have to wait until after the 2010 census, long after the new downtown plan is adopted, to get an accurate assessment of overall downtown housing trends.
Note: The 1990 study (available as an attachment below) shows 3,574 housing units downtown, but it uses a more expansive definition of the downtown area and also appears to count hotel rooms as housing units, something not done in the later reports. The 1990 figure used above subtracts the hotel rooms and excludes the blocks no longer considered to be within the downtown boundaries. The 2000 downtown housing data from the U.S. Census is available on the city’s website.
Bill – do you know what residential buildings have been lost?
Bill – In thinking about the development here the tall buildings I do not recall many properties that had residential on them that were taken down to build the new buildings.
Thus I am suprised to think we have gained so few units. Are you sure you are comparing apples to apples?
Also your graph is showing a net increase.
Known loss from 1990 to 2000
Hi Junad,
The chart shows a net loss between 1990 and 2000, even after adding the new construction during that time period. Since then there almost certainly has been a net increase — but it may be somewhat smaller than it appears. That’s why you see the question marks on the chart for 2005 and 2010.
We simply don’t know what has happened to the existing housing stock since 2000, because it seems nobody is tracking it.
Housing units can be lost in a variety of ways. Somebody buys two condo units and combines them into one. Somebody tears down a small storefront that had apartments upstairs. Somebody converts an old house that had been chopped up into several apartments back to a single family home.
If you look at the city website’s mapping system and select the 1998 aerial photos you’ll see that there used to be several small buildings on what became the site of the Church Street Station condos at Church and Maple. Same for the McDougal Littell building site a little further east on Church. Did they have apartments? I don’t know for sure. But I suspect that in at least some cases they did.
— Bill