What's an expanding city to do when it runs out of room? Take it online.
Cover Story
Evanston, Ill., ran out of room to grow. So an enterprising group of residents is expanding the city online
Evanston, Ill., doesn't look much like the City of the Future. After all, Evanston remains pretty much what it's been for the past century: a pleasant, bustling suburb and college town clinging to the shore of Lake Michigan just north of Chicago. But to longtime residents like Ron Kysiak, Bill Floyd, and Patricia Widmayer, the leafy midwestern municipality has all the makings of a model community for the 21st century. Especially online.
For starters, they'll tell you, Evanston is uncommonly diverse for a city of 73,000. It's got old-money heirs and new-economy millionaires, working- and middle-class families, senior citizens, and college students, as well as neighborhoods filled with Hispanic, Asian, Indian, Caribbean, and Eastern European immigrants. It's got a major university (Northwestern), several smaller colleges, and a high-tech research park. It's got a vibrant downtown full of such charming, locally owned businesses as a Himalayan restaurant and a bird-watchers' boutique. And it's got a rich heritage of innovation: previous Evanston natives invented Tinkertoys, the block party, and the ice-cream sundae.
That innovative history notwithstanding, Evanston is no business nirvana, and nobody knows that better than Ron Kysiak. As director of Evanston Inventure Inc., the local economic-development organization, Kysiak has monitored the city's commercial activity for some 15 years. Unlike the city's wide, tree-lined streets and miles of beachfront parks, its business landscape hasn't always been a pretty sight.
Right now most Evanstonians who want jobs have them; earlier this year the city's unemployment rate was just 4.3%, only a hair above the national average of 4.1%. But Evanston literally has no room to grow: the city, which measures just 8.5 square miles, ran out of open space long ago. That means there's no place to accommodate new factories, office parks, malls, or retailers. In recent years Washington National Insurance Co., Illinois Superconductor Co., and Rust-Oleum Corp., among others, moved from Evanston to communities with more or cheaper space. So did the back-office operations of two Chicago-area banks and the headquarters of Peapod Inc., the online grocery-shopping service. "It's costly to redevelop in a city like Evanston," says Kysiak, who previously headed economic development in Milwaukee and New Haven, Conn. "You have to knock something else down first."
Although today Evanston is home to 3,000 businesses, 9 of its 10 largest employers are nonprofits. First on the list: Northwestern University, with 4,000 employees, followed by two hospitals, the city government, the public schools, and the world headquarters of Rotary International, to name some. That worries Kysiak, a tall, thoughtful fellow with a Tim Conway-like manner that manages to convey mildness and intensity at exactly the same moment. "They're a huge economic engine, but they don't pay property taxes," he says of the nonprofits. That, in turn, pushes up taxes for commercial businesses, which then move to cheaper digs elsewhere, boosting city taxes even higher. Kysiak, who thinks carefully before he speaks and doesn't seem prone to overstatement, sums up the result this way: "It's a death spiral."
E-Tropolis Evanston is executing a simple, yet wildly ambitious, mission: providing constant high-speed Internet access to every business, home, school, institution, and government office in town, at competitive rates.
Meanwhile, since their built-up city has no malls and few big retailers, Evanstonians spend a lot of their money in neighboring Skokie and Wilmette, and even in Chicago's Loop, just 13 miles away. And because Evanston's highly educated, computer-savvy populace already uses the Internet -- 60% have connections at home -- Kysiak and others began worrying about losing business and sales taxes to E-commerce ventures like Amazon.com.
So about four years ago, Kysiak -- who also oversees a high-tech park jointly run by the city and Northwestern -- decided to focus on wooing small high-tech start-ups to fill existing office space, boost the tax base, and hire local residents. The only problem: his counterparts in other Chicago-area communities were doing exactly the same thing.
Clearly, Evanston's high quality of life wasn't going to be a big enough bargaining chip. The city needed to bring something distinctive to the table, something to offset not only the lack of space, but also the high taxes, limited parking, and awkward location several miles from the nearest freeway. Technology companies want good technology. Perhaps, Kysiak mused back in 1996, Evanston could provide the best. And perhaps everybody in town could benefit from it.
He already had a model right down the street. Northwestern had recently rewired its 150-building campus with a 222-mile fiber-optic network. He enlisted Patricia Widmayer, the university's manager of IT planning and development, to help him design the same kind of project for Evanston. Over countless working lunches, the two -- Kysiak the visionary, Widmayer the organizer -- began pulling together a 20-person community task force to design the electronic city.
Among the task-force members was Bill Floyd, a big, sandy-haired man who had lived in Evanston since 1973. He had recently retired from his job as chief information officer at Chicago-based Novus Services Inc., now Discover Financial Services. He was antsy and looking for something to do. His technical knowledge supplied the project's missing piece.
