Up and Over Fountain Square, Evanston

I talked about the Optima Towers awhile back, as one example of the rampant development in Evanston. If you live in Evanston, however, you would have noticed two other Optima developments that were built during the development boom, alongside a slew of other luxury buildings that are in between proposal, development, and sale. Although Evanston’s commission is tremendously more lax than their North Shore neighbors, these high-rise developers are encountering some obstacles in building the ultra-lofts of their professional dreams.

The Fountain Square building has been in the proposal phase for quite some time now (I’ve seen talk as far back as 2005), but Evanston Now has been following the chopping and cutting of the developer’s once-grand plans. The most recent decision literally lopped the top off of the building, deciding that any new buildings should not reach higher than the adjacent low-rises downtown. As a less-exaggerated version of Winnetka’s 50-ft. height limit, this will keep Evanston to a “low-rise” city, as a hybrid between its next-door villages and its major urban neighbor to the South.

This also means less units to sell for the Fountain Square developers. It’s up in the air whether this is a noble act in preservation, or a genuine anti-development sentiment on the part of the commission. Either way, Evanston’s aesthetic vision is nowhere near the rest of the North Shore. Is that such a bad thing?