Obama library plan stirs mixed feelings

Chicago district gentrification feared

CHICAGO — When word spread to Tara Madison that former President Barack Obama’s presidential center was coming to the Chicago lakefront park visible through her apartment windows, she was elated.

Madison, a 52-year-old social services worker, liked the idea of a gleaming facility honoring the president she supported and reviving rough sections of her neighborhood.

But then she began to worry that luxury condos might replace subsidized housing, including where she lives with her two children and two grandchildren, and that she’d be forced to move.

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

In 2016, Obama announced that 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. Now, Madison’s sentiments illustrate a question that announcement raised: 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.

Fear of gentrification — and the racial disparities that often come with it — has existed for decades in Woodlawn and other South Side Chicago neighborhoods. Woodlawn, 10 miles from downtown and just steps from Jackson Park, is more than 80% black, with nearly 40% of its 25,000 residents living below the poverty line, according to Chicago demographer Rob Paral. But there’s spillover from neighboring Hyde Park, home to the private University of Chicago, where only 30% of the residents are black and 23% are poor.

The center as proposed will display presidential artifacts and have walking paths, a public library branch and a recording studio. Unlike the other 13 presidential libraries, Obama’s will be the first fully digital one, with patrons able to access millions of emails, photos and videos from kiosks.

The center is expected to draw around 800,000 visitors a year, translating into $110 million spent in the city each year, according to a 2014 University of Chicago-commissioned study.

While Obama has touted the center as a youth leadership hub that’ll attract new businesses, some residents fear a resurgence that would push out longtime residents. Rents are already going up and several new homes sold in the $700,000 range this year, a neighborhood record.

A study by neighborhood activists estimated that up to 4,500 families would be at risk of displacement with development around the center.

Some groups have demanded a community benefits agreement to protect residents. At a meeting the Obama Foundation held in September 2017, then-activist Jeannette Taylor asked if Obama would sign such an agreement.

Obama, via video, said that as a former community organizer in Chicago he understood the concerns. But he didn’t think a pact was necessary because the foundation, which is raising funds and overseeing construction, is a nonprofit.

“The reason we want to do it [is] because this is the community we care about,” Obama said.

Activists, in protest, tried to prevent him from talking further.

“He forgot the people who got him into office,” Taylor said.

His response left her heartbroken, she said, and she used it to fuel a run for the City Council. She was elected earlier this year.

The same election featured a nonbinding ballot question spurred by activists asking voters from the areas affected by the center if they would support a community benefits agreement. Voters said yes overwhelmingly.

Taylor has since gained sponsorship for an ordinance calling for protections in a 2-mile radius around the Obama library, including designating 30% of the area’s housing as affordable, requiring buildings up for sale to first be offered to current tenants and establishing a community trust fund to help residents with property taxes.

The Obama Foundation hasn’t taken a position on the ordinance. The University of Chicago, which owns nearby land, is questioning the ordinance’s legality.