The Obama Center opens, and Woodlawn holds its breath

A landmark arrives in Jackson Park

On June 18, 2026, the Obama Foundation holds an invitation-only dedication for the Barack Obama Presidential Center, and the next day, Juneteenth, the doors open to the public. After construction that began in 2021 on a 19.3-acre campus in Jackson Park, the roughly $850 million project, a museum tower, a public forum building, a Chicago Public Library branch, and community space, is finally real.

We want to be clear up front about how we see this. The Center is a genuine asset for the South Side and for Chicago. A globally significant institution anchored on the South Side, drawing visitors, jobs, and attention to neighborhoods that have spent decades being told to wait, is something to celebrate.

But celebration and clear eyes are not opposites. The same investment that lifts a place can price out the people who held that place together when no one else was investing. That tension is the whole story in Woodlawn, and it deserves an honest accounting rather than a ribbon-cutting and a shrug.

What has happened to Woodlawn's housing

The numbers are stark. According to reporting by Illinois Answers and Block Club Chicago, the median price of single-family homes in East Woodlawn roughly doubled to about $440,000 between 2019 and 2025, and overall median home prices in the area climbed sharply over the past decade. New townhomes on South Ellis Avenue have been listed for close to $1 million each, a number that would have been unthinkable in this neighborhood not long ago.

Rents have followed. The same reporting documents tenants whose units jumped from $1,200 to $1,800 a month, and a five-bedroom apartment that rose from $1,000 to $1,500 over five years. Those are not abstractions. They are the difference between a longtime resident staying and being forced out.

And a newer pressure has arrived with the Center itself. A June 2026 WBEZ and Chicago Sun-Times investigation found that short-term rental licenses in the 20th Ward, which covers much of Woodlawn, rose about 46 percent since 2019 even as such licenses declined citywide. Housing advocates argue that every long-term unit converted to an Airbnb is one fewer home for a neighbor, tightening supply and pushing rents up further.

The people behind the statistics

It is easy to lose the residents inside the data, and we refuse to. Reporting from Illinois Answers and WBEZ has followed Woodlawn tenants facing eviction notices and relocations timed almost exactly to the Center's opening, including residents told to move by the summer of 2026. These are people who stayed through disinvestment and now face displacement at the moment their neighborhood becomes desirable.

Public officials have not been quiet about it. 20th Ward Alderman Jeanette Taylor, who helped write the protections, told reporters that what the community got was a watered-down version of what it knew it needed, and that saving maybe 100 families is not what people signed up for. Dixon Romeo of the housing group Southside Together called the protections a step in the right direction but not enough for the families being displaced by rising costs.

We think those voices are the heart of the matter. A neighborhood is not its real estate listings. It is the families, congregations, block clubs, and small businesses that make a place worth visiting in the first place, and they are exactly who is most at risk of being edited out of the success story.

The Woodlawn ordinance and the community-benefits debate

Woodlawn did not sleep on this. After years of organizing, the city adopted the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance in 2020, with anti-displacement tools meant to keep longtime residents in place. On paper it was ambitious. In practice, the reporting suggests it has fallen well short.

The gap between promise and delivery is the part we find most frustrating, because the ideas were sound and the follow-through was not.

If the lesson of Woodlawn is that good intentions written into an ordinance still require funding, enforcement, and political will to mean anything, then that lesson needs to travel to South Shore and every other neighborhood in the Center's orbit before, not after, the prices move.

• Of 52 city-owned lots promised for affordable housing, Illinois Answers reported one completed project of 58 units, 41 of them affordable.
• A $1.5 million preservation grant fund for refinancing reportedly received zero applications.
• A right-of-first-refusal protection for tenants reportedly saw no notices filed in five years and went unenforced, despite allowable fines.
• A home-improvement grant program did reach roughly 36 homeowners with about $20,000 each, a real but modest win.

Investment interest is not the enemy, indifference is

Let us say the thing investors are sometimes too cautious to say. Capital is flowing into Woodlawn and South Shore because the area is genuinely valuable, and that interest, handled well, can fund repairs, fill vacant lots, and create housing. The problem is not investment. The problem is investment that treats existing residents as obstacles rather than neighbors.

As people who buy, improve, and partner on South Side property, we hold ourselves to a simple standard. Buy fairly, improve honestly, and do not build a business model on displacement. There is a real difference between rehabbing a vacant, deteriorating building into solid housing and flipping occupied buildings to convert long-term homes into nightly rentals. We think the first strengthens a block and the second hollows it out.

We also believe the most durable returns on the South Side will come from working with the neighborhood, not around it. Mixed-income housing, owner-occupant pathways, and partnerships that keep longtime residents as stakeholders are not charity. They are how you build value that lasts longer than one market cycle. That is the spirit behind our joint ventures and our broader view of what we do.

What we think is best for Woodlawn

Our honest opinion is that the Obama Center can be a win for the South Side and a win for longtime Woodlawn residents, but only if the second outcome is pursued as deliberately as the first. Right now the building is finished and the protections are not, and that order of operations is exactly backward.

What we would prioritize is concrete and unglamorous: actually build on the city-owned lots, fund and enforce the tenant protections that already exist on paper, support owner-occupants and small local landlords rather than only large buyers, and treat the conversion of long-term housing into short-term rentals as the affordability issue it has become. None of that requires stopping the Center or fearing investment. It requires meaning what the ordinance already says.

The South Side has waited a long time for an institution like this. The people who waited with it should not have to leave to make room for the visitors. If you own a home or building in Woodlawn, South Shore, or anywhere on the South Side and want a candid, no-pressure conversation about your options, reach out to us. We would rather be part of a future this neighborhood actually gets to live in.