Purple Line Potential Earns Evanston Nearly $1 Million Federal Transportation Grant
EVANSTON, IL — The federal government has given the city of Evanston nearly a million dollars to hire staff and consultants to come up with ways to generate revenue from city-owned land near the Chicago Transit Authority's tracks.
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the $985,000 grant through its "Innovative Finance and Asset Concession Grant Program," a five-year program to provide public entities with $100 million to increase the value of taxpayer-owned assets.
Sec. Pete Buttigieg said the program, part of the 2021 bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, will help develop tens of thousands of units of housing in the coming decade.
"The grants we're announcing today will allow communities to partner with the private sector, develop and deliver transit-oriented projects on public assets, and get more housing and other public benefits and services completed more quickly," Buttigieg said in a statement.
According to the Transportation Department, 70 percent of the nearly $50 million in grants announced last week will go to downtown redevelopment initiatives and transit-oriented development.
Evanston's grant will be used to help city staff evaluate options for city-owned land near the Noyes and Foster stations on the CTA Purple Line.
Funding will be used to build the city's capacity to evaluate and leverage these assets for "innovative finance and delivery options," according to a description of the grant. That includes hiring staff to lead the project, managing external experts and coordinating with various other government agencies.
The grant is supposed to help Evanston come up with a strategy to form public-private partnerships, which could lead to new housing, businesses and revenue-generating opportunities around the stations.
"The City of Evanston has ambitious goals in the areas of affordable housing, sustainability, and community development," Mayor Daniel Biss said in a statement.
"We also have tremendous assets," Biss said. "With this grant, we will now have the tools we need to use those assets to realize our goals. I'm proud of this significant recognition of our innovative spirit and excited about what we'll be able to accomplish."
City staff said the grant will be used to start acting on the recommendations of a report prepared earlier this year by planning consultancy Urban3, the Government Finance Officers Association and the Common Ground Institute.
A city spokesperson has not responded to an inquiry as to how much was spent to produce that 93-page report , which suggested the city could potentially add about $60 million in value to its existing $1.1 billion value through targeted redevelopment of public assets.
Evanston's grant is one of only two in Illinois. The other is a $630,000 award to Chicago State University to study two sites along the 95th Street corridor to plan new development projects that could bring more resources and create a university village for students and the Roseland community.
Some other grants awarded as part of the program include paying for two thirds of a $3 million study to redevelop a bus hub in Providence, Rhode Island, spending $1 million to explore a site for a transit-oriented development in Austin, Texas, and using $450,000 to identify financing options to modernize a former U.S. Air Force base in Merced County, California.
Morteza Farajian, the executive director of the Transportation Department's Build America Bureau, said the grant program focuses on unlocking the value of underutilized public assets.
"The goal of this innovative program is to facilitate partnerships between private and public entities to deliver community benefits in a more efficient and cost-effective manner," Farajian said. "The selected recipients represent a wide range of projects that are good candidates for public-private partnerships."
interactive map showing the 45 local, state and regional public entities to receive grants from the Innovative Finance and Asset Concession Grant Program is available from the Transportation Department.
