Obama library neidhbors cear dentrification

CHICAGO — When word spread that the Obama Presidential Center was coming to the lakefront park Tara Madison has watched through her apartment windows for a decade, she was elated at the idea.

Then the 52-year-old social services worker and daughter of civil rights activists began to worry luxury condos might replace subsidized housing, including where she lives with her two children and two grandchildren, and she’d be forced to move.

“Because our area has become attractive to developers now, they’ll count us out,” she said.

Her sentiments represent a tangled conflict that has unfolded since Barack Obama announced his $500 million presidential center would be built in Jackson Park, near Lake Michigan and where he started his political career, taught law and got married: Could the legacy library of the nation’s first black president propel the displacement of thousands of low-income black families right in his backyard?

With construction looming and signs the neighborhood is already changing, residents are fiercely seeking safeguards for the place they also call home. The clash was the catalyst for one activist to become an alderwoman and led to both a ballot question gauging support and a resident-protections ordinance that could see a City Council vote within weeks, though its chances of succeeding are uncertain.

Fear of gentrification — and the racial disparities that often come with it — has existed for decades in Woodlawn and other South Side Chicago neighborhoods slow to recover from the recession. Woodlawn, 10 miles from downtown and just steps from Jackson Park, is over 80 percent black, with nearly 40 percent of its 25,000 residents living below the poverty line, according to Chicago demographer Rob Paral.