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Why in the world would Bill Smith take what appears to be righteous delight in making sweeping generalizations about all Northwest and North East Evanston residents, or for that matter any it seems, any resident who lives in a singe family neighborhood, or who ask questions and demands answers as to what direction the city of Evanston is going in terms of density and planning.

It seems that that Bill thinks it is ok to say things like “density-phobic neighbors” or” status-conscious neighbors” to infer that the residents are somehow neurotic or shallow.

My mini-tour of some of the local condo offerings led to some larger mullings. Altogether, the 4 developments I covered, representing nearly 100 new condos within a 9-iron shot of the Central Street Metra station, raise interesting questions. No doubt all will eventually sell; but at what price? One wonders if the demand for "transit-oriented" luxury condos here hasn’t been overestimated.

A frequent rhetorical trick is to oversimplify an issue, and then present to the audience, factfinder, or decisionmaker a false choice, usually with loaded verbiage. Henry Kissinger was a master of the "we have two choices" overdistillation; Donald Rumsfeld would frequently attempt the same thing by re-phrasing a question into an unpalatable option v. what the Administration was doing.

This tack is what one alderman employed in saying Evanston's only option is to "move forward" or else we "slip backward."

Both by nature and training I tend to look at multiple sides of issues. So, both to try and see if lemonade is extractable from the sour taste of the last Tower vote, and to try and extend some credit to Council members, I stepped back and looked at the punt to the Plan Commission in another light. One way to view it is that residents got, in part, what they asked for.