T.R. Goldman is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who writes about politics, health care and urban planning.

At first glance, downtown Evanston, Illinois, doesn’t look revolutionary—just another a gentrifying urban core with the obligatory Whole Foods, the local organic sustainable restaurants serving $14 cocktails, the towering new, high-end luxury apartments filled with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. The booming downtown feels increasingly hip; this summer it was featured as a “Surfacing” destination in the New York Times Travel Section. “I have everything here,” says Joanne McCall, pausing one evening on her way inside Sherman Plaza, a soaring, 26-story condominium building. “The post office, the dry cleaner, the movies, I work out upstairs, the Whole Foods is over there, the hair dresser over here. And the Uber thing is getting big here.”

It takes, in fact, a few extra minutes in the neighborhood to realize what’s different—and what’s missing. Downtown Evanston—a sturdy, tree-lined Victorian city wedged neatly between Lake Michigan and Chicago’s northern border—is missing cars. Or, more accurately, it’s missing a lot of cars. Thanks to concerted planning, these new developments are rising within a 10-minute walk of two rail lines and half-a-dozen bus routes. The local automobile ownership rate is nearly half that of the surrounding area.


Which again, may sound like so many other gentrifying urban areas. Who owns a car in Brooklyn, after all? But Evanston isn’t Park Slope—the city, now 75,000 strong, is quintessentially a suburb, somewhere to escape the density of nearby Chicago, a place to get extra room and, especially, a place to drive your car, jetting down Lake Shore Drive or the Edens Expressway to the Windy City. The houses in Evanston were so idyllic, in fact, that filmmakers came to use it as the beau ideal of postwar suburban life—it was where Hollywood came to film all-American suburban movies like Sixteen Candles, Dennis the Menace, Uncle Buck, and both Home Alone 2 and Home Alone 3.

And the whole point of the suburbs, reinforced by decades of local zoning laws and developers’ plans for a car-centric lifestyle, was that you weren’t supposed to live on top of your neighbor, that there was supposed to be plenty of parking everywhere you went and that you weren’t supposed to walk anywhere.

But Evanston had a different idea: What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged? As it turns out, what looks like normal urban gentrification actually marks the success of one of the most revolutionary suburbs in America. And its approach to development is fast becoming a model across the region—a model even embraced by its urban neighbor to the south, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Evanston, Chicago and their neighbors all now want to attract more people like Tyler Hauck, 27, who pays $2,200 a month for his 1½ bedroom apartment, which he says is in “definitely a high-end” building close to one of the region’s transit lines. “On the neighborhood list serve, people say things like ‘You’re paying all this money and you don’t have room for a car?’”

***

Urban density got a bad rap sometime in the mid-19th century—nobody found any redeeming value in the overcrowded Victorian slums of London—and by the beginning of the 20th century, the Englishman Ebenezer Howard’s concept of the “Garden City,” a series of outlying satellite villages to a larger, established central city, became the dogma of city planners around the world.

In the United States, the concept of density was further discredited after World War II when its antithesis—suburban subdivisions with big lots, plentiful cul-de-sacs and large connector roads to move people from home to office park to shopping mall—became not just the norm but the ideal. Aided and abetted by the construction of the federally funded Interstate Highway System and inexpensive Federal Housing Authority loans aimed at single-family homes for returning veterans, sprawl spread across the country like a wildfire.

Public transit ridership peaked in 1956, the same year that President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the interstate system, whose original 41,000 miles helped funnel the country’s shift toward suburbia.

Over time, the building practices that facilitated the classic suburban lifestyle became codified in local zoning ordinances, meant to separate commerce and residential life, and in wonky documents like the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ Parking Generation manual, which lays out a rigid ratio for the number of parking spaces required by various buildings, and has long served as the bible for developers and local officials. The manual’s fourth and latest edition, published in 2010, includes the number of suggested parking spots for 106 separate land-use classifications, including mosques, synagogues, motorcycle dealerships, and coffee and donut shops with a drive-thru window and those without. It’s a well-meaning book, written by well-meaning people, but the assumptions and mind-set of Parking Generation and other documents like it wreaked havoc via post-war sprawl—pushing American cities ever outward, creating decades of investment in billions of dollars of ever-wider interstates, and contributing to a nation choked by car emissions and hellish traffic.

By the 1980s, even close-in American suburbs like Evanston were beginning to be hollowed out by sprawl, as their residents decamped for cheaper exurbs fueled by new shopping malls filled with big-box stores.

Now, a half-century after the rise of the automobile transformed the American landscape, a new generation of urban planners is trying to reverse its dominance. “We treat our land as worthless when it’s not,” explains Yonah Freemark, pointing to a “dead” school bus sitting in a virtually empty parking lot almost directly underneath Chicago’s "L" train, as he walks along the city’s North Milwaukee Avenue.

At the local Metropolitan Planning Council, Freemark works on what’s known as “transit-oriented development,” TOD for short, the urban design movement that’s helped revolutionize places like Evanston—the idea that developers will want to incorporate mass transit into their planning and, in turn, discourage new residents from owning cars in the first place. It’s a planning concept that’s helped turn around Evanston’s trajectory, luring back residents and a new generation of millennials for whom “density” is actually a positive attribute.

It’s an idea that has its roots in an unlikely place a hemisphere away— one faced with a very different set of challenges.

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The problem in the 1970s in Brazil’s southern city of Curitiba wasn’t a lack of growth, but too much of it, too fast. The agricultural center’s population had rocketed from about 200,000 in 1950 to more than 600,000 in 1970—and it would nearly double again by 1980 on its way to 1.8 million people today, making it Brazil’s seventh largest city. Alarmed by the explosive growth, the city turned to a new generation of urban planners at its local university, where they found Jaime Lerner, then a 30-something architect whose parents had immigrated from Poland and who had an ambitious urban vision. In the years ahead, Lerner would remake Curitiba, become its mayor and eventually the governor of the surrounding state of Paraná, spreading his mantra that “City is not a problem, city is solution.”

Lerner’s Curitiba master plan embraced density and development around fixed transit corridors built throughout the urban area. Its hallmark was Bus Rapid Transit—extended-length buses with their own dedicated traffic lanes and specially designed boarding “tubes” that made getting on and off as efficient as subways with just a fraction of the cost and infrastructure. Under one of the plan’s more controversial aspects, a 15-block stretch of the main downtown artery, Rua XV de Novembro, was closed to traffic and transformed in just 72 hours into Brazil’s first pedestrian-friendly mall. Taken altogether, the plan was meant to, as Lerner would say, encourage curitibanos to adopt the life of a turtle—a creature whose home and workplace are the same.

The stunning success of Curitiba’s master planning revolution, which would place it at the forefront of the global urban architecture movement alongside cities like Helsinki and Portland, Oregon, transformed Lerner into an international urban-planning celebrity. And these bold new ideas came onto the world stage just as inner-ring American suburbs like Evanston were facing their own special set of problems.

With stops for Chicago Transit Authority buses and its “L” rail line, Metra suburban rail’s Union Pacific North line and the Pace suburban bus, Evanston always had great transit bones. For much of its history it had also been a relatively prosperous North Shore city, its growth initially spurred by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, as Chicagoans fled the metropolis' chaotic density, and in the 20th century, its share of once-famous industrial names, from Rust-Oleum Corp. to Shure, the audio products company, to Bell & Howell, then best known for its film cameras and projectors. There’s also the stabilizing influence of Northwestern University and the now quaint prohibition mentality of Evanston’s Frances Willard, who co-founded the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and whose home is an Evanston tourist attraction. (Indeed it wasn’t until 1972 that any restaurant in Evanston served its first legal drink.)

But Evanston’s self-image was badly battered when the Old Orchard shopping center—a vast plaza surrounded by thousands of parking spots—opened in neighboring Skokie in 1956, along with other malls in the years ahead. Over the next couple of decades, there was a long, loud sucking sound as Evanston’s once thriving downtown began to fall on hard times. Its major department stores closed, losing the battle to exurban malls, and corporate headquarters disappeared to cheaper office parks. “By the early 1980s, there was an 18 percent vacancy rate in downtown,” recalls Evanston’s former assistant city manager, Judith Aiello-Fantus, who worked for the city from 1967 to 2008. “We were trying to figure out how to reinvent ourselves.”

Leanne Redden, head of the Rapid Transit Authority in Chicago, is a major proponent of the kind of high-density, high-diversity development unfolding in Evanston. “We planning geeks have been talking about this stuff for 30 years,” says Redden. “We’ve been so successful that our vernacular has gone mainstream.” | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

As its property base dwindled, taxes soared—rising from $5 per $100 assessed valuation in 1965 to $12 by 1985. As wonderful as institutions like Northwestern University were from an employment and cultural perspective, the fact that some 40 percent of the 7.8-square-mile municipality belonged to nonprofit, tax-exempt institutions like the university made the tax burden that much harder on every other resident and business.

The answer to the suburb’s economic woes, as it turned out, lay in embracing Lerner’s theory that “city is not the problem, city is solution.” Beginning in 1986, a new plan for Evanston embraced the idea of a “24/7” downtown, pouring resources into increasing the density of its downtown—a density that also meant decreasing residents’ reliance on automobiles. As a compact city, Evanston couldn’t compete with the vast sprawling parking spots of the Old Orchard Mall. It had to build a different sort of appeal.

***

The TOD mantra, when properly executed, is that dense neighborhoods become diverse neighborhoods—diverse in population, retail, entertainment and housing. And that diversity leads to the sort of vital urban ecosystem that possesses what Jane Jacobs, who wrote the pioneering 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, calls “all destinations of daily life.” The vision behind TOD is for parking-light, high-rise residences with ground floor retail no more than half a mile from a transit stop.

At its root, TOD might seem to have an almost “sky-is-blue” quality of obviousness; after all, cities and towns originally all began at a transit node, most often a river or a port. In fact, it’s a prosaic name for an old idea—high-density residences with ground floor retail at or near a transit stop—a synergistic concept so elemental it’s hard to fathom why it ever fell out of favor. “We planning geeks have been talking about this stuff for 30 years,” says Leanne Redden, who runs Chicago’s Regional Transit Authority, the second largest in the country by passenger miles traveled. “We’ve been so successful,” she adds, with a laugh, “that our vernacular has gone mainstream.”

Today, more cities are embracing transit-oriented development and heralding it as an antidote to climate change, a cure for the anomie of our “Bowling Alone” culture and an economic boon to cash-strapped local governments. From northeastern “suburbs” like Arlington, Virginia, to western car-centric cities like Salt Lake City, to Dallas, local officials are pushing for mixed-use, high-density development within a few minutes walk of a transit line.

What's striking about downtown Evanston is that it's missing cars. Or, more accurately, it’s missing a lot of cars. The local automobile ownership rate is nearly half that of the surrounding area. | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

In Evanston, the change began slowly. Embracing TOD, as transformative as it can be, isn’t necessarily a fast solution. It can take municipalities years to buy up and assemble vacant, fragmented and underused land parcels around a transit station. And even then, it’s rarely obvious how to provide the mix of retail that gives residents and visitors what they want, and encourages them to walk—not drive—when they go shopping.

Evanston’s approach mixed investments in mass transit—including building a new downtown transportation center—and relaxing its zoning restrictions along two designated corridors, Main and Central Streets, to permit increased residential density. “Nobody wanted a 20-story building in their downtown,” recalls Aiello-Fantus, the former assistant city manager. “There was this perception that we’re just a little town and having something 20 stories changes that character.”

But a city needs revenue to thrive, and after the Washington National Insurance Co. moved out, the new development plan became Evanston's primary focus—and began to bear fruit. Whole Foods moved in and three buildings went up that were known as the “citrus balconies” because they were laced with either light orange, light green or yellow. The suburb’s trajectory changed, beginning its upward ride.

One of the hardest challenges Evanston initially faced was its own zoning regulations. Zoning requirements, which became widespread after they were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1926, might seem benign, an honest attempt to keep separate what should remain so. But they are by definition value-laden judgments that change over time. Whereas a suburban residential neighborhood might have once taken offense at a corner grocery store, now that might be considered a good thing, a way to avoid hopping in the car, facing the traffic, and negotiating a large shopping center just to buy a container of natural yogurt you can’t find at the 7-Eleven.

Like any bureaucratic invention, zoning regulations often take on a life of their own, growing and multiplying in complexity, and then calcifying into rigid, prescriptive formulas for each zoning district that dictate everything from land use to the size of the building to how far it must be set back from the road to the amount of parking that must be provided. And it’s these rigidities that have often made TOD’s high-rise, mixed-use, parking-light prerequisites a nonstarter in communities that might otherwise benefit from TOD’s added downtown vitality and tax revenue.

That attitude, however, is shifting, says Damir Latinovic, Evanston’s planning and zoning administrator. Zoning originally started as a way to “separate nuisances” from the general population, he explained, and so naturally led to proscriptive requirements—the more detailed the better—about what was considered incompatible with a particular district.

Now, he says, the emphasis tends to be more on how well the design itself actually works, and less on its specific purpose or use, that is, to actually look at a project’s impact on “the public realm, the street, the livable environment.”

“People have realized that if you say a particular use is not allowed somewhere, well, maybe that particular use can operate in a manner that’s not a nuisance,” he explains. “Take a grocery store: You have the impact of the hours of operation, the truck deliveries, the surrounding illumination. But what if there was a smaller grocery store on a corner in a residential area?

“There’s been a shift in the population which has triggered the need for mixed-use districts,” he added, “so the needs of millennials with young families, and retiring baby boomers—we definitely keep that in mind.”

In Evanston, for example, projects over 20,000 square feet are considered a “planned unit development,” which gives city officials the ability to trade off a developer’s wishes to build taller or with fewer setbacks in exchange for wringing the most “public benefit” from a project—from public art to an LEED silver building to a plaza or car-share spot. And there’s no fixed formula, just a guideline that tries to mirror a community’s downtown development plan, in Evanston’s case, one that was put together in 2009.

“The developers, they know their bottom line, and they’ll propose something that makes financial sense,” says Latinovic. “But we’re trying to get as many public benefits as possible. Are you contributing to the bike share program, are you beautifying an underpass?”

Michael McLean, a transit oriented developer who is developing a project in Evanston, is shown here in his office in Chicago. McLean admits that he does have a car but for a good reason: "I am currently driving due having to drop my son off at school in the morning." | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

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Embracing a new vision for Evanston also meant tackling head-on the suburbs’ love affair with a car-centric view of daily life. Evanston’s normal zoning ordinances, for example, call for 1.25 parking spaces per studio apartment, 1.5 spots for a two-bedroom apartment, and two spots for a three-bedroom unit. Those requirements are generally way too high for a transit-oriented neighborhood, which by definition is designed to make a car redundant, with its access to mass transit for commuting and plenty of retail on the ground floor of high-rise residences.

Mandatory parking minimums also wreak havoc on architectural design and can hinder the very street life necessary for a high-density neighborhood. “To build a gigantic parking garage on a flag lot would have created a five-story bunker that would have killed the street, it would have been dark and cold had no life on it whatsoever,” says Evanston-area developer Michael McLean, referring to the L-shaped lot of his project, 1571 Maple Ave., which includes just 12 on-site parking spots.

Evanston’s willingness to abandon its tight parking restrictions to facilitate the growth around the transit hubs is working: Ownership of one car or none within half a mile of Evanston’s downtown "L" and commuter rail stops was 80 percent in 2009 compared with 47 percent for all of Evanston. “In our region, all kinds of suburbs want to be Evanston,” says Kyle Smith, a TOD specialist at Chicago’s nonprofit Center for Neighborhood Technology. “All of Evanston’s neighbors look jealously and say ‘I want a Trader Joe’s, I want jobs, I want that walkable downtown.'”

Constructing parking is not only bad for developers and urban planners, but it raises rents and prices for residents as well. Each parking “stall” in a so-called “structured” multistory building can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000—the spot costs more to build than buying the car—and can add as much as 20 percent to the rental price.

A study completed this summer, called “Right Size Parking” and led by Washington state’s King County public transit authority, found that the county was significantly “over-parked”—multifamily buildings there had 40 percent more parking spots than were actually being used. How was this information determined? By actually counting the number of cars parked at 223 multifamily properties on three weeknights between midnight and 5 a.m., the presumed “peak parking” hours when the maximum number of spaces would be in use.

And overparking is a very big deal, especially in the context of TOD. “Parking is the literal intersection between transportation and land use,” explains Daniel Rowe, who oversaw the three-year project for King County Metro Transit. “And the whole concept of TOD is providing land use that is supportive of transit. So to get TOD right, you have to get the parking right.”

Because parking stalls are so expensive to build, and the extra land they require so expensive to buy, they can increase the cost of rent while commensurately reducing the availability of affordable housing. Developers usually don’t want to manage parking lots, so when there are too many spaces, tenants or condo owners will often be offered an extra space or two when they move in, he explains. And that, urban planners say, leads to unintended effects on people’s auto ownership rates: Give people a place to park their car and they’ll get a car, or keep the one they have.

Eliminating mandatory parking minimums was a key step to tackling Evanston's love affair with car-centric transportation. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Rowe and his team set out to find a more precise way to measure parking needs, one that was closer to reality than more general categories found in the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ less-than-scientific Parking Generation manual, which assigns parking requirements based only on land-use and uses a loosely drawn sample at that.

“We decided that if anything will ever change, we needed good solid science,” Rowe says. “So we used very robust methods. Instead of relying on property managers we sent people out to do the counts.”

The result was a model that looked at seven variables—“localized contextual information,” says Rowe—from the average cost of rent and parking to frequency of transit. It found, perhaps not surprisingly, that the amount of transit and density of development were the two most important factors determining the number of parking spots needed. The variables Rowe’s team collected were plugged into a new equation that looks like gibberish (to the nonmathematically inclined) but might represent one of the biggest breakthroughs in revitalizing urban and suburban cores.

That equation produces a far more sophisticated estimate of a specific project’s individual parking needs. For people living in central business districts, for example, parking requirements can drop to as low as one car for every two units, while in the suburbs, the ratio is more than double that figure. And the project included the creation of a Web tool—a residential parking calculator—to help developers and planners more precisely plot their parking needs.

Some cities are going even further, eschewing altogether any prescriptive approach and letting the market determine the number of parking spaces required for a project. “We’re giving the developer the liberty to act more appropriately,” Rowe says.

In 2013, Chicago aldermen passed a TOD ordinance that encourages developers to build within 600 feet of a commuter rail or metro station by sharply lowering the parking requirements and increasing a building’s permissible height. That means higher density buildings with more units for the developer to sell without having to build as many costly parking stalls. Last month, the city’s 50 aldermen passed an amendment to the ordinance that essentially eliminated parking requirements within a TOD zone, and doubled that zone to a quarter mile from a transit stop—a move that increased tenfold the amount of Chicago now eligible for parking-light development.

“We are behind in terms of progressive cities doing TOD,” says 1st Ward Alderman Joe Moreno, who sponsored the TOD ordinance and amendment. “If you create density around our hard rail, people will live there and rely on our train system, bus system, bike paths—which are going to get better—it’s good environmentally and good economically.”

In Moreno’s area of Chicago in Wicker Park, for instance, that new way of looking at parking requirements helped get developer Robert Buono’s new project at 1611 West Division St., off the ground. The modest-size 11-story rental unit on top of the Blue Line’s Division Street "L" station, is shrouded in what look like scores of large, rectangular breastplates. It’s an eye-catching design made all the more so because it sits at the edge of a six-corner intersection in a dusty, gentrifying set of streets opposite the stately 1926 classical revival style Home Bank and Trust Building—which is now a CVS.

Buono says 1611 West Division, as the building is known, is the first TOD in Chicago in modern times. It’s right at a transit stop, there’s a Divvy bike-sharing station across the street and an Enterprise car share on site and—it was built with nary a single parking space. Its 99-units were fully rented within six months.



***

In the mile and a half between the Blue Line’s "California Street" station—the next stop up from Division Street—and the Logan Square station—where the gentrification wars are most intense, there are at least nine TOD projects already under way.

Joe Moreno, Alderman of Chicago Ward 1, at the location of the site of a Max Gerber kitchen and bath showroom in Chicago, which was vacant for several years before being demolished in 2012. Alderman Moreno introduced the city's first transit-oriented development ordinance in 2012. | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

“One of the biggest questions is ‘how do we want to grow our population?’” says the Metropolitan Planning Council’s Freemark, pointing to two drive-thrus just off North Milwaukee Avenue. “Literally a block from transit, a drive-thru bank that could be first-floor retail and a McDonald’s drive-thru,” he says with genuine exasperation.

The irony is that many urban lots are actually best suited for buildings that don’t try to accommodate cars—especially if you’re trying to encourage a vibrant street life. “One of challenges of a 13,000-square-foot lot is that structured parking is effectively impossible,” says Buono, referring to the type of parking that can take up several of a building’s lower floors. “A parking level starting at the second floor is effectively dead space, no matter how hard you try. You have to access it via ramps, it disrupts the presence of a building, not only at the ground floor but aesthetically as you go up. You don’t see lights on or activity in the building, you simply see a parking garage.”

To assuage neighbors’ fears that the lack of parking would mean even more competition for the relatively few on-street spots, Buono and the city agreed that building residents would not be issued a parking permit. For the building’s mostly millennial residents, that’s obviously not a deal-killer.

In fact, across the country, transit-oriented development is finding its tenets embraced by two very different generations of residents—up-and-coming millennials who have never owned a car and retiring baby boomers who want to move back in from the exurbs where they once raised their families in car-oriented McMansion subdivisions.

“One of the big things is bBoomers wanting to live downtown and take advantage of the proximity to amenities,” says Stephen Schlickman, a professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who lives in a condo near Chicago’s Roosevelt Station. “They want to get the most out of what they saved, and can do that by shedding their car.”

Meanwhile, millennials, who have seen their young careers affected by the economic recession and high levels of student debt, are more interested in keeping their costs to a minimum from the start. “They’re choosing to work smarter rather than harder, and part of that is giving up things they don’t need,” explains McLean, the developer. “And one thing they certainly don’t need is a car.” Nor its expense. The American Automobile Association says it costs an average of $8,700 a year to own a car, about $58 in total vehicle expenses per 100 miles.

A growing body of research shows that millennials are less reliant on cars, more likely to use transit, and more inclined to ride bikes and walk than both Generation X-ers and baby boomers. And not only are they driving less, “fewer of them are driving at all,” according to “Millennials in Motion,” an October 2014 study by U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group, which compiled the results of several national transportation surveys.

“The key thing we really found with millennials is that they want a sense of community and a sense of place—it’s not just having a ‘building next to a transit stop, so I’m good.’ It’s ‘can I be part of a community?’” says Michael Melaniphy, president of the American Public Transit Association. “People are flocking to this and paying for it. And when it happens, it’s magical.”

In 2013, Chicago aldermen passed an ordinance encouraging developers to build within 600 feet of a commuter rail or metro station by sharply lowering the parking requirements and increasing a building’s permissible height. Above, North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

That new mind-set is being driven—so to speak—by a variety of new technologies and changing lifestyles that are making it easier than ever to live without a car: The rise of mobile technology, car-sharing and bike-sharing programs and apps like Uber and Lyft, are helping millennials get by without owning their own cars. Evanston’s economic development division manager, Johanna Leonard, says she overheard a conversation between two of the city’s young residents, explaining, “My Uber was only $150 this month—that’s still less than a car payment.”

Smartphones are proving a boon for transit ridership, which has jumped 39 percent nationally from 1995 to 2014, double the population growth. Not only can you now work on the train with your smartphone, there’s mobile ticketing, real-time alerts, a built-in entertainment system while riding to work, and perhaps most importantly, the ability to track when the next public transit vehicle will come. “There are at least four buses that stop in front of my building,” Schlickman says. “And the first thing I do when I get down to the lobby is to check my phone to see how long till the next bus, and whether I have time to go get a cup of coffee.”

Transit agencies embracing local development efforts require some parking attitude adjustments to make of their own. Old-style transit thinks of its stations as nodes, slight bulges along the length of a rail line where passengers get on and off, that require plenty of spots for suburban commuters who need a place to park before boarding the train and heading to work.

New-style transit sees its stations as real places whose value can be “captured’ or leveraged in the local real estate market, not simply way stations where people embark and disembark.

Yet “leveraging” a revitalizing neighborhood’s growth often leads to the all-too-familiar complaints about gentrification, as poorer residents are forced out by wealthier neighbors. That’s why gentrification protesters often pejoratively refer to TOD as “transit oriented displacement.” And indeed, no one has found a satisfactory solution for the Gordian knot that ties neighborhoods of increasing prosperity with decreasing options for longtime medium and low-income residents. It’s not just that new developments filled with millennials and baby boomers buying those $5 coffees are going to drive up the cost of a bottle of milk. It’s that they’ll send property values soaring, which will raise property taxes, which will raise rents. And given that scenario, many longtime families will inevitably cash out and sell their homes, making room for even more pricy development.

That familiar cycle is playing out now in Chicago, on North Milwaukee Avenue, where new commerce—with its clean lines and crisp signage—is filling in the street’s gaps, providing an almost caricaturish contrast with landmarks from a previous generation and a poorer demographic. Filter Coffee Lounge is just a few doors down from the vintage Harold’s The Fried Chicken King; the raw juice boutique, Jus Juus, sits a hundred yards south and across the street from Goldblatt Sewing Machines, Inc.

“They’re all after this,” says Goldblatt’s Norm Levin, 79 , gesturing up and down the block. “Almost every week we get an offer. We were offered a million-and-a-half,” says Goldblatt, whose father-in-law founded the store in 1935.

The neighborhood contrast can be exhilarating or exhausting, depending on whether you enjoy drinking brewed organic kurimi from Ethiopia at $5 a cup from Intelligentsia Coffee, on the ground floor of 1611 West Division, or are about to lose your shabby but comfortable apartment of 30 years to a wrecking ball.

“Communities need to take a stance and say: ‘Wait a second, we want this to be an open and inclusive TOD, a downtown area where people are not displaced and everyone can interact and be part of this, and where [all] workers can take advantage of transit access,” says Brendan Saunders, director of organization and advocacy at Open Communities, which supports affordable housing in 16 areas in north suburban Chicago.

Today in Evanston, nearly 600 new housing units are under construction or in the planning stages, according to the city’s director of community development, Mark Muenzer, who says the city’s downtown could still handle another two to three thousand additional units. And that’s in addition to another seven buildings with just over 1,300 units that have recently been completed. Above, Evanston at night. | Mark Peterson / Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

“What you have to realize is that TOD is just a perfect way to include affordable housing in development,” he says. “Because if people truly have the ability to get rid of their cars, or to go from two to one, that’s a huge savings,” he adds. “And if you still have access to jobs, all of those things together are among the more important parts of ‘affordability.’”

On a late summer evening in Evanston, sun-tipped clouds are cast against a clean blue sky, and the packed sidewalk restaurant tables along Church Street and Chicago Avenue are filled with prosperous-looking customers. “Let’s stop and eat here, it looks so fun,” coos one woman to her teenage daughter before settling in at Found, where the food meets the hipster credo of “local, organic and sustainable.”

Today in Evanston, nearly 600 new housing units are now under construction or in the planning stages, according to the city’s director of community development, Mark Muenzer, who says the city’s downtown could still handle a further 2,000 to 3,000 thousand additional units. And that’s in addition to seven more buildings with just over 1,300 units that have recently been completed. As growth has boomed, the expanding tax base has allowed the city to cut its tax rate steadily since the 1980s, down now to around $8 per $100 assessed value.

“We get the best of both worlds here,” says Muenzer, who spent most of his career working for the city of Chicago. “An urban feel in suburbia.”

To the south, Chicago is also seeing new growth. Its downtown has added 35 corporate headquarters since 2011, and its population has increased by 15,000, a number that seems insignificant until you realize the city lost 100,000 citizens each decade from 1980 to 2010, while suburban Chicago grew by nearly 2 million people. When he introduced the expanded transit-oriented development initiative this summer, Mayor Emanuel estimated that the effort could add $400 million in economic activity and $100 annually in new tax revenues.

And, in a nice bit of symbolism, and a sign that the national push for more transit-oriented projects might be making a difference, public transit ridership nationwide in 2014 reached its highest level since 1956, the year the nation’s Interstate Highway System was launched and public transportation began its seemingly inexorable decline. Perhaps the end of the automobile’s tyranny is within sight. As Curitiba’s Jaime Lerner has often said, “The car is like your mother-in-law: You have to have a good relationship with her, but she cannot command your life.”