CHICAGO — In a windowless room, across the street from the muddy maw of earth that will soon mark the legacy of President Barack Obama, lifelong Chicago resident Michele Williams leaned on the handlebars of her walker.
Wedged between people sitting around folding tables, scattered chairs and standing along every spare inch of wall, the 80-year-old considered whether to ask the city’s next mayor about the issue foremost on everyone’s mind: being able to stay in their homes on the South Side.
The Obama Foundation has told residents that the $500 million presidential center will help transform some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods and offer opportunities to those who live there. But Williams and others have watched its construction with mistrust. With the center’s opening still two years away, rents in the surrounding South Shore and Woodlawn neighborhoods already are rising. Median home prices have more than doubled since the center’s location was unveiled. Some longtime residents have been priced out.
In February, nearly 90 percent of voters on the South Side told city officials via a referendum that they should do more to create affordable housing and provide aid to renters and homeowners who live near the Obama Center. But whether the city acts on that will depend on Brandon Johnson (D), the winner of Tuesday’s runoff for mayor.
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As Johnson strode into the packed room last month, less than two weeks before that election, people already had their hands up, questions at the ready.
“Will our rents be raised?” asked one resident.
“Will we have to move?” asked another.
“Some of us have lived here for more than 40 years,” a woman said.
Advocates hope that overwhelming voter support for legislative intervention will spur the next administration to act. But an unspoken question looms: Would that be enough? Or are the forces of displacement amid such colossal development unstoppable?
“What happens in communities where there is economic development is families get pushed out because of property value raises,” Johnson told the room. “We have to make sure, for families that live in the very communities where economic development is taking place, that landlords don’t see it as an opportunity to push the families out who have been a part of these communities for decades, since—”
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“Since before the library's come,” a woman interjected.
“Talk to me, sister,” Johnson said.
In the back row, Williams listened closely. Then she told her neighbors what she said no one likes to say out loud.
“The Obama Center is not being built for Chicago,” she said. “It’s being built for the world.”
And the people of the world, Williams said, “don’t want us here. So what do you think is going to happen?”
As Obama Center rises, so do neighborhood’s rents
At a ceremonial groundbreaking two years ago, the former president and first lady picked up shovels, turned soil and declared the site open for business.
By then, the project had endured a federal review, protests from community members who believed it would be better placed elsewhere and five years of legal challenges from environmental groups.
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The ceremony was meant to showcase the community where Michelle Obama was raised and the place where Barack Obama launched his political career. The Obamas each were introduced at the dais by a student from the high school across the street.
“It feels natural for Michelle and me to want to give back to Chicago and to the South Side in particular,” the former president told the audience. “The Obama Presidential Center is our way of repaying some of what this amazing city has given us.”
As he spoke, a cluster of demonstrators calling for affordable housing guarantees from the city stood just beyond the perimeter of the construction site, holding poster boards and bullhorns. Dixon Romeo, a South Shore native and founder of the community organization Not Me We, told a gaggle of assembled press that South Shore residents don’t want Obama’s legacy marred by the displacement of thousands of Black families.
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“This is the community that sent him to the White House, and we should be the community that gets to stay and benefit from the presidential center,” Romeo said.
The Obama Foundation said it has attempted to engage community members in discussions about resource allocation and the impact the historic investment will have on the area. It has estimated the center will bring $3.1 billion to the surrounding community during the construction period and first decade of operations, not counting an estimated $16.5 million in indirect and induced state and local tax revenue.
Michael Strautmanis, the Obama Foundation’s executive vice president for civic engagement, said he was “encouraged” by the overwhelming February referendum vote. Although the foundation did not take a position on the ballot measure, Strautmanis said it would support community-driven efforts to mitigate the harms of gentrification.
“Our hope and intention is that the people who live there now are able to enjoy the center when it comes online,” Strautmanis said. “There is an opportunity for this to be a success story.”
But housing costs in the three Zip codes surrounding the Obama Center have risen dramatically since 2015, just before the center’s location was announced, according to Zillow data. Median rents around the center increased by 43 percent. Home values, the data shows, have jumped more than 130 percent over that span. That’s more than 50 percentage points higher than the U.S. average.
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“With a development of this size and economic impact, it was unavoidable that it would have a profound effect on the local housing market and exacerbate existing affordability challenges for many low-income residents of Woodlawn and South Shore,” said William Sites, a professor in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the nearby University of Chicago. “The evidence was pretty clear that even before the groundbreaking, early on in the predevelopment process, housing values were rising quite dramatically in both Woodlawn and South Shore.”
In 2019, the neighborhood was dubbed the worst in Chicago for eviction filing rates by the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing. Vacant homes, advocates said, have since become an attractive commodity for developers trying to flip houses and hike rents.
The area “is fundamentally changing — now,” said Sarah Ware, president of the Chicago Association of Realtors and herself a South Shore resident. As the center progresses, she said, interest and home prices have continued to climb. “Once we can see the actual center it will, of course, be a destination,” Ware said.
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Nearly a third of homes for sale in the third quarter of 2022 were purchased by investor buyers, according to data analyzed by the Illinois Answers Project, a nonprofit investigative outlet.
For the past two years, South Side homeowners said, they’ve had to swat away increasingly frequent calls from developers who want to purchase their homes.
“I get these phone calls almost every day, like, ‘Are you looking to sell your home?’ ” said Linda Jennings, 73, a retired nurse who has lived in her South Shore condominium for nearly 20 years. “I tell them no, because this is my home.”
Pushed out of South Shore
It’s been more than a year since Tahiti Hamer, 42, was forced to move out of the only neighborhood in which she had ever lived.
Hamer, a single mother of three, was born and raised in South Shore. She went to church there, graduated from school there, went on to work and raise her own family there.
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In 2021, the same year the Obama Center broke ground, her landlord raised the rent by nearly 40 percent. Hamer, already paying more than a third of her income on housing, said she called the landlord to see if she could negotiate it back down.
But there was nothing she could do.
“She said, ‘Oh, you know, the area is changing. My taxes have gone up,’” Hamer recalled. “So, that’s it, then. I’m a working mother who can’t afford to live in my own community that I’ve lived in for 42 years.”
Just before she moved to a home in the suburbs, Hamer noticed that an investor had bought and flipped the house across the street. It sold at a markup of roughly 10 times what the developer paid for it.
Hamer’s new place, a single-story house on a tree-lined street south of the city, has a backyard and a one-car garage and room enough for her girls and their black cat, Galaxy. But she misses being close to friends and family, being a short drive from work, being a part of the only place that feels like home.
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“I’m afraid if I ever want to move back into the city, it’s just going to be that much harder to get back there,” she said.
Sites, the University of Chicago professor, said the best chance Chicago has to prevent more displacement is implementing requirements around the development and protection of affordable housing in South Shore. Other legislative changes, such as establishing rent controls, would also help, he said, but would need to be adopted citywide — a process that would take much longer than a neighborhood ordinance.
“What these community members are asking for is merely that they have a chance to stay in the community once the conditions many of them have suffered through, in some cases for generations, begin to change,” Sites said. “Unfortunately, they’ve started to change not because the people who live there are, on their own, deserving of investment and opportunity, but because outside investors have determined that these are places they want to develop.”
Chinella Miller, 38, who works as an educator for a local nonprofit, was forced to move out of her South Shore home less than a year ago, when her landlord raised the rent by 90 percent. She tried looking for another place nearby, but, she said, rents were higher than she had ever seen.
“That was when I knew we couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.
Though she and her three children found a place in a different neighborhood on the South Side, she said she hopes to be able to move back to South Shore, to be closer to family. She’s been scouring rental listings, searching for the right one. Recently, she said, she began to notice a pattern: Property listings in South Shore are increasingly citing the Obama Center as a selling point.
One recent listing read: “71st Street will be the next hot area for shopping, restaurants and rental units, according to the Obama planning committee.”
Fighting for a Chicago legacy
Romeo got involved in the push to safeguard residents of the South Side soon after returning from college. With an economics degree in hand, he came back to a neighborhood that had just been told it was the new site of the Obama Presidential Center.
“It seemed to me that some of the concerns folks were raising — even then — about having a really visually appealing tourist attraction in the middle of all these homes, what’s going to happen?” Romeo said. “Rents, property taxes, all of that is going to exponentially rise.”
For Romeo, the fight against displacement in South Shore isn’t just the right thing to do for the community he calls home. It is about his own family’s survival.
Romeo, 29, a third-generation Chicagoan, grew up in the neighborhood in the modified American Foursquare home his grandparents bought in 1964. The red-brick house where he did his homework and sat around the dinner table with his two siblings is less than a mile from the soon-to-be Obama Center. It was his refuge.
Then, in 2021, his mother lost her job as a charter school teacher and fell behind on tax payments. For years, Romeo said, she told no one. Before long, she was close to $30,000 in debt.
Romeo, who rents a two-bedroom apartment within walking distance of his family home, won an award last year from the Field Foundation of Illinois for his work organizing communities on the South Side. It came with a cash prize of $25,000 — money he said he used to buy himself a single pair of shoes. He then headed down to the Cook County Clerk to pay off the lien on his mother’s house.
“I know what it feels like to go down to Cook County and pay off a tax lien. I know how they treat you,” Romeo said. “I know that regardless of why you’re there, it’s just this terrible feeling. This deep amount of shame.”
It’s why the list of demands that Romeo’s organization and its partners have devised to present to the city includes tax debt forgiveness. Low-income residents of Chicago’s 5th and 7th wards owe roughly $2.3 million in property taxes as of 2019, according to the Obama Community Benefits Coalition.
In 2020, Chicago passed a similar ordinance in the nearby Woodlawn neighborhood that established a program to provide homeowners with repair assistance and reduce their property taxes. The legislation also outlines a city plan to turn 52 vacant lots into affordable housing, allow renters first dibs on properties put up for sale and offer financial assistance to residents amid a changing housing market.
Romeo, who also advocated for the passage of the Woodlawn ordinance, said these guarantees must be expanded to residents in neighboring areas, who are facing the same threat of displacement.
“This is deeply personal to me,” Romeo said. “I do this work because my mom has been extremely vulnerable to being displaced. I, myself, am extremely vulnerable to being displaced. That drives me. It’s not charity; it’s not me coming down from on high to talk to ye little people. I’m a little person. It’s not a you-all problem; it’s an us problem.”
Though the Lightfoot administration declined to take on establishing an ordinance for the residents of South Shore, Johnson told residents at the meeting last month that he would support their demands.
Priscilla Dixon, 62, has watched with blooming pride as her son challenged members of Chicago’s City Council, called out Lightfoot and even challenged the Obamas to consider the community impact of their newest project.
When the voter referendum was on ballots this February, she said, she proudly checked yes.
“I wanted to reach out to all of the ancestors and go, ‘Look! My baby is on the ballot,’ ” she said as Romeo shook his head.
As she spoke, a neighbor driving past in a minivan slowed to a crawl. The neighbor called out the car window as Dixon waved. The community, Dixon said, used to be filled with Black families. Everyone, it seemed, knew one another. As a girl, she used to walk to a commercial corridor nearby replete with a designer shoe shop, theaters and restaurants. Her neighbors held receptions for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and blues artist Bo Diddley.
That was before South Shore became a food desert, before eviction and crime rates rose, before the pandemic drove even more businesses and people from the area. “I’m a notorious magical thinker, but I have to believe,” Dixon said, grabbing her son’s arm, “something is going to happen and make things better.”
Romeo nodded. He had a tenant meeting to get to, parents to meet with and, always, more doors to knock on.
“I’m doing everything I can,” Dixon said later. “In political spaces, people can become numbers, experiences can become trends. But the reality is that this is about real people, and we don’t want the Obama Center — the center honoring the first Black president — to be another page in the long history of displacing Black people or doing harm to Black families. The city is the only one that can stop that.”
This article has been updated with the result of the Chicago mayoral election.
correction
An earlier version of this article included a map that placed the Obama Presidential Center by 64th Street. It is by 61st Street. The graphic has been corrected.
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