Given the small radius the Barnharts wanted to live in, they knew the market was going to be “super tight,” Aaron says. They didn’t want a large house or to be in a condo building. Through conversations with friends at the church, the Barnharts learned that Evanston had recently changed its zoning to make accessory dwelling units (ADUs) — small-footprint housing commonly known as carriage houses or granny flats — easier to build. (The change took effect in 2020.) The church made a proposal: They could build an ADU in the backyard of one of the Reba properties. For the Barnharts, saying yes was an easy decision.
Their perfectly sized house is being constructed by the Evanston Development Cooperative, a cooperatively owned builder that specializes in ADUs. The worker co-op is also a local advocate for the efficiently sized homes as a way to address the often-interlinked issues of race, climate change, and affordable housing. It was founded in 2018, the same time that the city took the first step to update its zoning code for ADUs.
“I think we accelerated what the city was already doing,” says Robinson Markus, one of EDC’s co-founders and co-owners. “We were intimately involved in these conversations on how to shape the policy.”
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