The Obama Presidential Center is going up in Jackson Park, and the South Side is already feeling the pressure. Pastor Corey Brooks, a longtime Woodlawn minister, writes in his Fox News column of rising rents, spiking property values, and the fear among longtime residents that they’ll be pushed out of the neighborhood the center claims to help. He’s not wrong about any of that. He just has the diagnosis exactly backward. Brooks’s answer is personal responsibility, mentoring, faith — an internal renewal that, in his telling, needs no structural safeguards from the outside. That’s a real position. But the thing displacing his neighbors isn’t an $850 million building. It’s a property market that will take any public investment in a disinvested neighborhood — a park, a transit stop, a presidential center — and convert the benefit into a windfall for whoever owns the land.
The mechanism is simpler than people think, and Brooks is too sharp to miss it if he lets himself look.
Brooks is right that top‑down, celebrity‑driven projects often deliver symbols for the powerful and disruption for the powerless. That’s a real critique, and it deserves a real answer: the problem isn’t that someone built something in Jackson Park. The problem is that Woodlawn, like every disinvested American neighborhood, has almost no structural protection against what happens after investment arrives. No community land trust pulling housing permanently off the speculative market. No serious rent stabilization. No community‑ownership structure that lets the people who already live there capture even a fraction of the value their own neighborhood generates. So when an $850 million center goes up, or when a new grocery store opens, or when the transit authority upgrades a station — the benefit flows upward to whoever holds the deed. The public investment does the work. The landlord collects the rent.
That’s not Obama’s personality. That’s the property market operating as designed. Since the Obama Center was announced, the median sale price for single‑family homes in Woodlawn has jumped more than fourfold — not because the homeowners improved them, but because the public project down the road changed the neighborhood’s desirability. On the east side, closest to the center, prices have doubled just since 2019. The owner who did nothing captures the gain. The tenant who paid rent for twenty years gets a letter. The Airbnb operator from three states away buys the unit the tenant just left, lists it by the weekend, and turns what used to be someone’s home into a nightly‑rate commodity. That is how the property market works — it vacuums up the value created by public investment and hands it to whoever holds the deed. Brooks is blaming the man on the building instead of the machine beneath it.
Brooks concedes the receipts himself, in his own telling. Rents are climbing. Values are surging. Airbnbs multiply. Longtime residents talk openly about being pushed out. Those are the predictable consequence of introducing public money into a neighborhood with no binding affordability protections, no land trust, and no ownership structure that keeps long‑term residents in place. Housing organizers and tenant advocates in Woodlawn pressed for years for a legally binding community‑benefits agreement with the Obama Foundation — a deal that would have locked in affordable‑housing commitments, local‑hiring standards, and anti‑displacement protections. In a non‑binding referendum, nearly 90 percent of voters in the affected precincts supported such an agreement. The foundation offered voluntary “Community Commitments” instead — pledges without legal force. The property market didn’t wait for promises.
And here’s the part that should sting Brooks most: the people who fought for structural protections — the organizers, the tenant unions, the housing advocates — are the very people his column dismisses as dependent on politicians. They weren’t waiting for Obama to save them. They were building the institutional floor — the land trust, the affordability covenants, the tenant protections — that would have kept the center from doing exactly what it’s now doing. Brooks calls that waiting. It’s actually the opposite. It’s building the cooperative structure, the ownership tool, the collective mechanism that stops the property market from doing exactly what he’s angry about.
What does the alternative actually look like? It’s not glamorous, and it won’t make a good rooftop sermon, but it works. Community land trusts — the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, the Dudley Street initiative in Boston — take housing permanently off the speculative market. A family buys at an affordable price, builds modest equity, and sells at a modest gain. The land beneath the house stays in trust. It can’t be flipped, can’t be loaded with debt, can’t be converted to an Airbnb. The trust is the structural answer to the displacement Brooks is documenting — not a monument, not a foundation photo‑op, but an ownership form that says: this land belongs to the people who live on it, and no developer, no operator, and no fund is going to price them out.
There are other tools. Limited‑equity housing cooperatives: residents own shares in the corporation that owns the building, elect the board, set the maintenance fees, and when a member leaves, they sell their share back at a restricted price. The building stays affordable generation after generation. It works in New York, in Washington, in Minneapolis. It would work on the South Side. A tenant opportunity‑to‑purchase act: when a landlord decides to sell, the tenants get the right of first refusal; they can form an association, buy the building, and turn it into a co‑op or a land trust. Washington, D.C., has a version; it has preserved thousands of affordable units.
These are not government miracles. They are ownership structures. They keep the value that public investment creates — a presidential center, a new transit line, a renovated park — in the pockets of the people who lived there before the investment arrived. They convert rising land from a threat into a resource.
Brooks has the right fury. He’s burying young men, running a leadership center on the most dangerous block in America, and watching a presidential library go up while the block stays broken. That anger is earned. But he’s pointing it at a man when he should be pointing it at a machine. The machine is the property market — the one that will turn any investment, public or private, liberal or conservative, into a windfall for whoever holds the deed, unless someone builds the structure that keeps the value in the neighborhood. Project H.O.O.D. is doing honest, bricklaying good — training workers, breaking cycles of violence, offering the kind of hope that comes with a paycheck and a mentor. But none of that stops a rent hike. What stops a rent hike is a lease, a deed, or a cooperative share that does not expire when the neighborhood gets popular.
The Obama Center doesn’t have to displace the people it claims to uplift. Woodlawn doesn’t have to be another neighborhood that got “improved” right out from under its own residents. But the answer isn’t personal responsibility, and it isn’t faith, and it isn’t a sermon against monuments. The answer is an ownership structure that says: when public money changes this neighborhood, the benefit stays here. Brooks has the energy. He has the community standing. He has the credibility of someone who’s been doing this work for decades. The organizational infrastructure already exists — the coalition that fought for the CBA built it. Brooks doesn’t have to invent the tool. He has to pick it up.