Evanston here...I like it a lot. Great community to be raising a family in, and now that we have the shopping centre its a very convenient place to live too. Five years ago, not so much, but now its awesome.
The parks and playgrounds are great for the kids, nice walking trails along the creek and you can get down to the shopping centre without driving.
The ring road is an incredible boon for Evanston residents - it puts a ton of access into the various major western residential centers in the city at our fingertips.
People will probably bitch about transit, but its not that bad - the 420 (insert joke here) runs about every 20 minutes during rush hour and gets you up to the 301 express that runs downtown. There is less frequent service until about 11pm at night, and it also runs on weekends.
One other thing that I like, is that Evanston/Creekside is kinda isolated - its bordered by the ring road and doesn't have any adjacent communities, so you have no flow-through traffic at all. As a result, you don't see much in the way of vandalism, theft, crime, littering, etc, because there are not really any strangers moving through your neck of the woods.
The only con to Evanston to watch out for might be that the east side of the community that borders the ring road could potentially be fairly noisy. I'm about a block in and its not too bad, but if you were the first line of houses that conveniently forms a sound wall for the rest of us, I imagine their backyards are pretty noisy at rush hour.
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-Scott
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