Chicago's South Side is celebrating a historic moment Friday with the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center, a sprawling $850 million campus that has already reshaped the economic and social landscape of Woodlawn, South Shore, and Hyde Park long before the public walks through its doors.
The opening comes with a complicated legacy. Longtime residents and community leaders say the project, announced in 2016, has accelerated a gentrification wave that is displacing the very Black working-class families who built and sustained these neighborhoods through decades of disinvestment.
Pastor Jeffery Campbell, who has led Woodlawn Baptist Church for 22 years and worked with Obama in the 1980s on community organizing initiatives, has watched parishioners get priced out. "I have watched the neighborhood go from being a 'gang-infested, you can't let your children walk down the street' area to now being a mixed-racial, mixed-income community that is fast pricing out the people who weathered the storm," Campbell said.
The numbers tell part of the story. Between 2000 and 2019, 25 percent of Black residents left Chicago citing school closures, public housing demolitions, overpolicing, and lack of resources. In Woodlawn, 78 percent of residents rent their homes, and many are struggling to stay as rents climb. The median annual income in the neighborhood is $39,802.
When community groups formed the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition in 2016 to negotiate directly with the Obama Foundation, they hit a wall. During a 2017 public meeting, Alderman Jeanette Taylor asked Obama directly about a community benefits agreement. Obama declined, saying the project would bring jobs and partnerships with Chicago-based organizations.
The coalition shifted its strategy to city government. Chicago's city council passed legislation last fall that gives displaced tenants preference in housing created on city-owned lots and establishes a grant program for property tax relief. Yet an Illinois Answers Project investigation found that many programs set up to support affordable housing have gone unspent.
The role of the University of Chicago, which borders Woodlawn and hosted Obama on its faculty from 1992 to 2004, adds another layer to the displacement story. Davarian Baldwin, an American studies professor at Trinity College and an expert on university-community relations, notes that universities use real estate holdings to fund endowments. When property values are low, they buy land and hold it. As their presence expands and property values rise, surrounding areas gentrify without the university directly evicting anyone.
"It's not about us pushing you out directly, it's just that you can no longer afford to live here," Baldwin said, describing the dynamic. He noted that the university actively supported discriminatory racial covenants in the 1930s, which Black Chicagoans called "University of Chicago Agreements to Get Rid of Negroes."
The housing squeeze has hit seniors especially hard. Campbell's church is now building a 46-unit affordable senior housing complex on land it owns, approved in 2023 and months away from construction. Many older parishioners sold homes they could no longer afford to maintain as property taxes and living costs climbed.
In neighboring South Shore, referred to as Chicago's "eviction capital," the patterns have played out similarly. Dixon Romeo, a lifelong South Shore resident and executive director of Southside Together, helped his mother handle property taxes on a deceased relative's home after she fell behind. "It really started to set in for me, just like how many systems are set up to take our homes away from us but aren't really set up to support us," Romeo said.
He later founded the organization that became Southside Together and joined the benefits coalition. While former Mayor Rahm Emanuel did incentivize new building in Woodlawn through city programs, most were market-rate apartments beyond reach for working-class residents. "When folks look around, all the additional promises that came from the city, all these new things that were going to pop up and fill the needs in the neighborhood haven't really materialized," Romeo said. "But what has materialized is the higher cost of rent."
Data backs his concern. Short-term rental licenses in the area jumped 46 percent while declining elsewhere in the city. Rent and property costs have climbed significantly over the past decade.
Not all residents share the same concerns. Maurice Palmer, a 54-year-old South Shore resident, is thrilled about the opening. "To be part of a presidential library, it's Chicago, we're thrilled," Palmer said. He acknowledged his own rent has increased since construction began and homeowners worry about rising property values, but called the center historic and said he plans to bring his children.
Marquinn Gibson, a lifelong South Side resident and cafe owner in Woodlawn, agrees the center is good for the community but stressed the need to protect those who built it. "My only concern is really just protecting the folks who've always lived here, and who create community and the history, and who make Woodlawn what it is today," Gibson said.
Author James Rodriguez: "The Obama Center is undeniably a source of pride for Black Chicago, but the administration's failure to secure binding community protections before allowing the project to transform the neighborhood was a missed opportunity that residents are now paying for in rent receipts."
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