The Obama Presidential Center opened Friday on Chicago’s South Side, drawing thousands to a ceremony on Juneteenth that celebrated the nation’s first Black president, even as the $850 million complex that has been under construction for years now stands at the center of a real estate transformation that has been accelerating since the project was announced in 2016.
In Woodlawn, the neighborhood that hosts the 19-acre campus, 78% of residents are renters and rent-burdened, with a median annual income of $39,802. Between 2000 and 2019, Chicago lost a quarter of its Black population, a decline driven by school closures, demolition of public housing, overpolicing and lack of access to resources.
Pastor Jeffery Campbell of Woodlawn Baptist Church has spent a decade trying to protect his congregation from the rising costs that come with new investment. He was raised in the neighborhood and has served as pastor there for 22 years. Campbell said he has watched the neighborhood transform from what outsiders once viewed as dangerous into a mixed-income community that is now pricing out the people who stayed through the difficult years.
“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.
Some of his parishioners, long-term homeowners in their 60s, sold their homes because they could no longer afford rising property taxes and maintenance costs. In response, the church is building a 46-unit affordable housing complex for seniors on land it owns, a project approved in 2023 and months from breaking ground.
Campbell worked with Barack Obama in the 1980s, when Obama was a lawyer who helped file incorporation papers for a community nonprofit and taught community organizing training courses. Their shared history did not insulate the neighborhood from the pressures of the presidential center, Campbell said.
In 2016, a coalition of community groups formed the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, hoping to negotiate a legally binding agreement with the Obama Foundation. Dixon Romeo, a lifelong South Shore resident and executive director of Southside Together, a community organization focused on housing and environmental justice, said the coalition found no success.
At a 2017 public meeting, then-Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor asked Obama directly for a community benefits agreement, according to Romeo. Obama rebuffed the request, saying the project was already bringing benefits through jobs and partnerships with Chicago-based organizations.
Unable to secure a direct agreement, the coalition turned to the city. Under Mayor Brandon Johnson, the Chicago City Council passed legislation last fall that gives displaced tenants priority in any housing created on city-owned lots, creates affordable housing in neighboring areas, and establishes a grant program for property tax relief. But an investigation by the Illinois Answers Project found that many of those programs have gone unattended and that money set aside for residents has gone unspent.
Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel incentivized new construction in Woodlawn through city programs, but many of the resulting buildings were market-rate apartments out of reach for working-class residents, according to the Guardian report.
“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. But what has materialized is the cost of rent,” Romeo said.
The University of Chicago, which borders Woodlawn, has played a role in the area’s transformation, according to Davarian Baldwin, a professor of American studies at Trinity College who studies university-community relations. Baldwin said the university historically used racially restrictive covenants to shape the racial geography of the city — agreements that residents renamed “University of Chicago Agreements to Get Rid of Negroes.” In the present day, Baldwin said, the university holds significant real estate and benefits when property values rise, even as longtime residents are displaced.
“Black residents screamed fears of displacement. Obama dismissed them, [saying] that there’s nothing to worry about, while at the very same time … property values soar far above the median income of most residents in that neighborhood,” Baldwin said.
South Shore, which has been referred to as the “eviction capital of Chicago,” faces similar pressures. South Shore resident Maurice Palmer, 54, said he is excited about the center — “to be part of a presidential library, it’s Chicago, we’re thrilled” — but added that his rent has been adjusted upward since construction began. Homeowners in his neighborhood are nervous about rising property values, he said. A WBEZ analysis of city data found that short-term rental licenses in the area increased 46% while decreasing citywide.
Marquinn Gibson, a lifelong South Side resident and cafe owner in Woodlawn, called the opening an achievement but voiced concerns about protecting long-term residents.
“I think it’s good for the neighborhood. I think it’s good for the community. I know that there are some community concerns around employment, housing … and the folks who have been living in Woodlawn long before the Obama Center came,” Gibson said.
“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.”
Despite the anxieties, Palmer said he plans to visit the center with his children. “I am going, and I’m gonna go and bring my kids there,” he said.