Isn't "freeway" mainly a California thing?

freeway in MN (where I grew up), I adapted to expressway ;)

One thing to be aware of, if you decide to drive in on a really cold day, a lot of other people will have made the same decision. I've often seen traffic be quite a bit worse on cold days (and no snow/ice to cause it due to bad roads, just more people).

Current Evanston resident here (at least, until June). If you're working at Northwestern Hospital, you might be able to take the NU intercampus shuttle bus from Sheridan Road (and the big parking lots at Ryan Field) to the downtown campus.

I did a similar commute this summer to River North, and I took the Purple express to Merchandise Mart, but the hospital is significantly further East so the bus is a better option as long as your job covers it. If you have a Northwestern employee ID card, you should be fine.

Finally, re: quality of life in Evanston. The relationship between the university and the city is really, really, bad, a function of the school not having to pay any property taxes on its bundle of valuable lakefront real estate. Rents are really high in the "nicer" part of Evanston near campus, and there are constantly issues between students partying and residents trying to live in peace (despite the fact that NU isn't a party school compared to anywhere else in the Big Ten). Check out this article: http://gawker.com/5664243/epic-rager...ghten-children. Ridiculous, on so many different levels.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about the area, too.

Before I get started on this, disclaimer, I'm an NU alum, former NU employee, and was an Evanston resident for 10 years not counting my 4 as a student.

To be clear on this, that's the relationship between the city council/government and the university. IME, most residents don't really care all that much (and a good number of them are tied in some way to the university, either as employees or alums). Obviously, those living really close like in the article below would be an exception to that.

History note: Northwestern has been there longer than Evanston (1851 vs 1855) and has that property tax exemption in its charter (that is, state law). The Evanston city council routinely uses that exemption as a red herring whenever they have problems balancing their budget and need to raise taxes (look over there! they're not paying taxes! it's their fault yours have to be raised, not that we can't control our spending!). This isn't a recent thing. I found a news record once of this same thing happening in the 1870s. That's right, the city has been using this excuse for at least 130 years. Northwestern also generally pays for the city services it uses (has own police, pays for fire service, pays for water/sewer, etc).

It's not just near campus that's nice. Most of the area between the L and the Lake is nice, as are scattered other areas like Central Street.

That party thing seems odd to me. Was a random home game (homecoming was a couple weeks later, family weekend was one week prior), was a loss, so the exuberance level should have been down some. I guess it was only 3 weeks into the year, so probably another week until midterms rolled around. If it'd just been near the game, etc, I'd happily blame the Purdue fans, but it sounds like it was the houses near Maple/Foster. That's been a weird spot for years. Split neighborhood, bunch of houses rented to students, the rest residents, those off campus spots tend to get more parties, since campus is pretty heavily regulated.

Actually in my experience they are quite the opposite - more like "crawlways" or "parkingways" :D

Hey now. They're just fine...

At 3 AM Sunday morning.

lol, isn't that true....

I'm a NU senior, and you're pretty much spot-on. Most residents (especially in the "student ghetto" between Ridge and Sheridan) understand this, they know that they're moving into a college neighborhood, and they recognize that if they lived near campus in a place like East Lansing or Madison things would be much, much rowdier. Northwestern employs more police than the city itself, and actually funds a "party car" operated by EPD to patrol the student areas on weekend nights. Things are changing, slowly, with university president Shapiro a lot more open to wet status for fraternities on campus because he recognizes that it's bad PR/neighborhood relations for drunk students to be causing a ruckus in the streets around campus.

This was in the news again this week, with Evanston threatening to begin enforcing a decades-long "brothel" ordinance (actually, had nothing to do with brothels ever, but NU took the moniker and ran with it) that prohibits more than 3 unrelated people from living together. See: http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/upd...-law-1.2448459 Enough bad press made them back down, but the law remains on the books, and it's believed that the university agreed to think more about bringing social life back on campus when they talked to the city government about this.

I was referring to the "nicer" area as the part where students live, even though most of the houses and apartments that students rent are anything but nice...converted sun porches as bedrooms, people living illegally in basements, etc. There are certainly some families who have been there for a while and have really nice houses, but the whole area is kind of a zoo. Back to the topic of this thread, if the OP is looking to move to Evanston I'd recommend more "downtown" - the new condo buildings are pretty nice and not a bad deal with the weakened real estate market, and there's a lot less competition for housing once you get a bit further from campus because students aren't as willing to make the trek to their classes, so rents are way lower.

I agree with some of the other posts saying to look at other north shore communities like Wilmette, Winnetka, etc. Evanston is an easier commute to NMH, but the Metra is pretty good from points north as well.

Sorry, but this is not true. Evanston has 165 sworn officers. I can't find a sworn number for UP, could only find 93 for all divisions, but that's including parking enforcement, which I don't think are sworn officers (they're not even part of the police in Evanston).

The trend toward pushing the partying off campus goes back to the early 90's (just before I started) when there was a rash of people getting drunk and falling out of 3rd/4th floor windows (it was 3 or 4 people, 2 died within a year or so). Hell, back in the late 80's, there was a bar in Norris. Those days are long gone. It's probably wise to reverse the current trend that has pushed so much of the raucous behavior off campus into the surrounding neighborhoods.

My personal favorite is the formal dining room with french doors to the living room converted to a bedroom. Two different places I lived in had that one.

So, I would like to bump this thread with some updates. I'm about 6 mo from moving to chicago and we're still trying to figure this thing out. We've decided against Evanston, now we're thinking Sauganash, Lincolnwood or Skokie. With metra, it seems to take about 45 min to 1 hr to make the trip. How long is the drive from these areas? Again, need to be at Northwestern Hospital at 7:30 am and I get done with work at around 5 pm. Thanks.

For me, to commute by car into the city every day would be hellish.

Traffic, ice, snow, rain, stress. Not to mention the cost of gas, parking, depreciation, insurance...

You can get work done on the Metra, too, or just do your recreational/newspaper reading.

However, obviously a lot of people disagree, based on the traffic.

Interestingly, of all the choices, Evanston was going to be the easiest, least expensive commute. Sauganash is a lovely area but there is no way to get anywhere from there. :) (My choice would be Evanston and the L.) You're going to have to bookmark travelmidwest.com and watch the roads. I've got it on my iPhone and it's a godsend.

The drive from any of them probably won't be too bad in the early a.m., but nightmarish at 5:00.

Hopefully, someone who has lived in those areas will post and help you out.

In those areas, you'd be on the expressways. Coming in early, you'd mostly be fine, Kennedy to Ohio to St Clair or something depending on where your parking is. You're talking early enough that it won't be too awful.

OTOH, going home at 5 would be terrible. A couple times a month, I end up driving to Skokie around that time (from Lakeview on the north side) and the traffic is almost always terrible.

Look into the Metra options (someone upthread mentioned that NMH has its own shuttle from Ogilvie/Union, oh, google found it easily http://www.northwestern.edu/uservice...instation.html), like toomanybooks says, at least on Metra you can read or work or do something beyond agonizing over the traffic.

Huh? Metra to downtown from Evanston is 20 minutes. El to downtown from Evanston is about an hour.

It's not too too difficult to take the el from the Metra station downtown. It would involve about a 5 block walk, however. But I bet that NMH has a shuttle of some sort.

Driving from Evanston to NMH and back sounds like hell.