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Pastor Jeffery Campbell has deep ties to Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood. He was raised in the South Side neighborhood, and has served as pastor at Woodlawn Baptist Church for 22 years.

And for the past decade, he’s attempted to protect its residents from displacement and gentrification. He’s seen rising rents, residents squeezed by university development and life becoming more unaffordable. Now, there’s a new challenge: the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Center – part of a 19-acre, $850m campus – that has transformed life in the neighborhood, as well as the adjacent South Shore and Hyde Park, long before this Friday’s opening to the public.

Campbell worked with the former president in the 1980s on the founding of an organization called the Lugenia Burns Hope Center – Obama was the lawyer who helped file incorporation papers for the non-profit and was an instructor for their community organizing training courses. But despite their shared history, Campbell’s vision for what Woodlawn needs differs from Obama as one of the people involved in fights for affordable housing and whose church is a member of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition.

The Obama Presidential Center officially opens Friday, 19 June, also Juneteenth, but the approaching opening of the center has created ripple effects for the local housing market and for longtime residents years before. The center’s opening comes amid an affordability and housing crisis that has touched most parts of the country and has deeply affected working-class South Siders for decades.

‘Pricing out the people who weathered the storm’

The South Side and city as a whole have seen the displacement of longtime Black residents in recent years. Between 2000 and 2019, 25% of Black residents left the city citing school closures, the demolition of public housing, overpolicing and lack of access to resources, as reasons to move. In Woodlawn, 78% of residents are renters and rent-burdened. The building and proximity of the prestigious University of Chicago in addition to the incoming Obama Presidential Library have created a slow-moving but consistent churn of displacement for the mostly low-income, Black residents who live in neighboring areas. And while locals expressed a mixture of pride and slight weariness, housing in a city that is always changing is front of mind.

When the project was first announced in 2016, a partnership between nearby community groups formed, called the Obama CBA Coalition. They said they hoped to negotiate directly with the Obama Foundation, but soon found that route fruitless. “Initially, the coalition was trying to get a signed community benefits agreement document between the city, the [Obama] Foundation, and the University of Chicago, and that did not happen,” said Dixon Romeo, a lifelong South Shore resident and executive director of Southside Together, a community organization that focuses on housing, environmental justice, youth and health.

In a 2017 public meeting, Romeo said “Alderwoman [Jeanette] Taylor at the time had tried to ask the president directly about that”. Obama rebuffed her request, saying that the project was already bringing benefits to the community through jobs and partnerships with Chicago-based organizations.

In an attempt to protect housing for local residents, the coalition members turned their sights on the city and have thus far been able to secure two separate ordinances under different mayors that protect tenants. Chicago’s city council passed legislation last fall that protects displaced tenants by giving them preference in any housing created on city-owned lots, creates more affordable housing in the neighboring areas and establishes a grant program for property tax relief. Despite commitments from the city, an Illinois Answers Project investigation found that many programs set up to support affordable housing in the area have gone unattended and money set aside for residents has gone unspent.

“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,” said Campbell. “And [the people] who were there when the buildings were being burned and when you had to be careful about what you said.”

Campbell has witnessed this first-hand, as he’s seen parishioners get priced out of Woodlawn.

“The immediate impact [of the Obama Presidential Center] is the gentrification that is occurring in the community, has occurred, meaning people who had been long-term residents of the community were being priced out on the market by speculators,” said Campbell.

Another important aspect to rising housing costs is a lack of age-specific protections for senior homeowners.

“Most of our members were older people in their 60s and a couple of them wound up selling their homes because they could no longer afford to pay the taxes that were going up, nor pay the other costs associated with maintaining the homes, so a couple of them sold their homes and went into senior facilities,” Campbell said.

In response, the Woodlawn church is in the process of building senior-specific affordable housing on land it owns to ensure that older people can stay in the neighborhood. The project was approved in 2023 and is months away from breaking ground on a 46-unit apartment building.

“His organization is aware of what the community needs, by the same token, he has this link with the University of Chicago, which has always been a major player in terms of trying to change the tenor of the area,” said Campbell.

The link with Obama, who taught at the university from 1992 to 2004, is a complicated dynamic since the university has long been the subject of critiques from neighbors of its role in gentrification going back to the 1930s. It actively supported discriminatory racial covenants, agreements that allowed homeowners and neighborhood associations to restrict the sale or rental of homes to mostly African-Americans in areas around its campus. With such agreements in place, the university could set the racial geography of the city and enforce segregation.

Davarian Baldwin, an American studies professor at Trinity College and an expert on university-community relations, said Black Chicagoans understood how covenants limited their access to housing and mobility, renaming them “University of Chicago Agreements to Get Rid of Negroes.”

In present day, the university both courted the project to the South Side and facilitates the gentrification that has driven out longtime residents.

Universities can do this because of their real estate holdings, which often fund their endowments, according to Baldwin. When property values are low, they buy up land and hold on to it, sometimes turning it into student or researcher housing until the expanded presence of the university raises property values and the surrounding areas.

“That benefits the university,” said Baldwin, but also allows such institutions to say: ‘It’s not about us pushing you out directly, it’s just that you can no longer afford to live here.’”

Baldwin added that Woodlawn was once considered “a no-go zone for the University of Chicago and for most so-called middle-class white professionals”. But now, one of the selling points for the presidential center was “increased property values, in [an] area that is historically Black and divested”, he said.

When the project was announced, Baldwin said: “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.”

In the neighboring South Shore, which has been referred to as the “eviction capital of Chicago”, the housing issues plaguing Woodlawn played out in similar ways.

A mix of celebration and unease

When the site was first announced, Romeo had stepped in to help his mom manage property taxes for the home of a deceased loved one, which was its own dilemma on top of grieving. “She took it hard and fell behind on her property taxes, and kind of told me at the last minute. I scrounged up some money to take care of it. It really started to set in for me, just like how many systems are set up to, you know, take our homes away from us but aren’t really set up to support [us],” said Romeo.

It became clearer how much Romeo’s own experiences were linked to others in the area after he attended a community benefits agreement meeting and saw how people at the meeting talked about housing, property taxes and displacement. He later joined the coalition of organizations organizing to protect housing in the area after co-founding an organization that would later become Southside Together.

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 [higher] cost of rent,” said Romeo, referring to promises made by the administrations of former mayors about the benefits of hosting the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. This included more affordable housing. While the former mayor Rahm Emanuel did incentivize new buildings in Woodlawn through multiple city programs, many of these were market-rate apartments and homes were out of reach for working-class residents in a neighborhood whose annual median income is $39,802.

“It is more expensive to live in South Shore and Woodlawn now than it was 10 years ago, and it’s inherently been exacerbated by the pending existence of the center,” said Romeo.

Maurice Palmer, a 54-year-old South Shore resident, is excited for the opening: “To be part of a presidential library, it’s Chicago, we’re thrilled.” Palmer has already seen changes. “My rent has been a little adjusted since all the building, and the homeowners are nervous about the prices going up,” he said. Additionally, Palmer noted the increasing number of Airbnb’s in the area. A WBEZ analysis of city data found that short-term rental licenses in the area increased 46% while decreasing in the rest of the city.

Despite those concerns, Palmer is still excited to visit the center since it’s historic and commemorates the journey of the country’s first Black president. “I am going, and I’m gonna go and bring my kids there.”

Marquinn Gibson, a lifelong South Side resident and cafe owner in neighboring Woodlawn, agreed that the opening of the center was an achievement.

“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,” said Gibson.

“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.”