The Indicator from Planet Money - Obama's new Presidential Center and his tricky relationship with the South Side

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

How do residents of the South Side of Chicago feel about their new neighbor: the Obama Presidential Center? A mixture of pride and excitement, tempered with some concerns about what it could do to housing affordability. On today’s show, we’re bringing you an episode from our friends at Code Switch on the new center and its relationship to the historically Black neighborhoods around it. Connect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s brand new newsletter — Buy the Planet Money book — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Whalen Wong. A few weeks ago, not so far from where I live, the Obama Presidential Center opened on the south side of Chicago. We were going to do an episode on it, but our friends at Code Switch got there first. So today we're going to share with you

their excellent full half-hour episode on the new center and its impact on the neighborhood around it. Hope you enjoy. What's good, y'all? You're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And I'm BA Parker. Okay, so there's this school on the south side of Chicago called Hyde Park Academy.

It's really big, and it has a lot of the challenges that really big inner city schools with lots of poor kids have. You know, old building, not a lot of resources. You've heard that story before, yeah. Just last month, some students there walked out of class to protest because three students died over the course of just one month. That's horrible. But the students who walked out said that the school had cut the community group, offering support services. But right across the street, Stoney Island Avenue, from High Park Academy, is the sprawling,

ambitiously designed campus of the Obama Presidential Center. Not the presidential library, even though that's still what some folks call it. Right, right, right. But there is actually a Chicago public library branch on the center of campus grounds. But anyway, it has a big basketball court. There are grills for everybody to use. It's a state-of-art play. ground in a museum. Parker, this is a sledding hill. A sledding hill? Yeah, because you know,

Chicago is famously flat. And so Michelle Obama, you know, who grew up nearby on the south side, had them built one because she never got to sled as a kid. Oh. The Obama Center reportedly cost around $850 million to build. And the Obama Foundation tells the fact that it was almost all private money that was raised to pay for this thing. But you know how it goes. The city, of course, had to come up off some money for costs related to this construction in a public park there. So the Obama Center is set to officially open to the public on Juneteenth. But from almost the moment around 10 years ago, they announced it back in 2017, that this pretty spot sitting on Lake Michigan would be the spot for the Obama Center. There has been pushback, like a lot of it and from a lot of different directions.

Yeah, I've heard about some of that. There were people concerned that this big, shiny new campus to commemorate the Obama presidency would speed up the job. gentrification already happening on the south side. People having to move because the cost to rent in the neighborhood was going to go up even higher. Right, right, right. And other folks were concerned that letting the Obama Center build on this public park in the city, that would mean opening up parkland to other profit builders. But also, like, don't the folks on the south side deserve nice things, too? And that's a really big sentiment, too, Parker. People have a lot of feelings about their new neighbor, like this 2019 high park graduate who requested we not.

use her name because she currently works for the city and is not authorized to speak to the media. And I'm saying the Obama Center isn't a bad thing. It is truly a really good thing if it is used, right, if it is prioritized for the people who live in that community. The studio, the little part, I can see myself walking my dog in a little garden next to little Nancy and Karen. But she did share that the neighborhood around the Obama Center has become too pricey for her and her family. She wondered how all this would affect her old school. People like students like me, wouldn't be able to attend there. That's the end goal.

They don't want to continue to cater to black students if that's the way they want to move. But, you know, public space is always contested, not unlike a presidential legacy. True. And the architecture of this place. I mean, what's a diplomatic way to say? It looks excessive.

Right. Right. It looks like a giant, they call it the Obama. Amalisk, pejoratively. Oh, but. But a lot of the architectural reviews of this center are about the very different vibe you get from looking at this place, depending on where you're standing. Like, either it looks like a beacon in the sunlight or this big foreboding monolith. I mean, it probably looks different if you're a tourist walking the grounds than it would if you're one of the kids of that high school across the street.

And it's like transforming this intensely segregated neighborhood. And so that's what we're getting in. answer today, Parker, because we're talking to two South Siders who have been looking into the Obama Center, and we're going to dig into the complicated local legacy of the man and the myth that this sprawling project commemorates and celebrates. And we're going to try to think back to those heady, hopeful days not all that long ago when the Southside's dreams and the country's dreams were all wrapped up in each other. Take it away, Gene. So I wanted to pick the brains of some of our Code Switch Play Cousins who live on the South Side.

These are folks who have been covering the Obama Center and, you know, all the drama around it from different angles in their day jobs. Since the notion of putting the center on the South Side was just a baby idea. I am Natalie Moore, a Chicago native, long-time reporter and editor in Chicago. And I teach journalism at Northwestern University. And I'm Myra Kwaja. I'm a writer and an educator and a multimedia producer. I've been at the Invisible Institute for the past 10 years. It's a journalism production company on the south side of Chicago.

We mostly investigate police misconduct, but for many years, we also had a youth program at Hyde Park Academy, which is across the street from the Obama Center. And I interviewed kids about their feelings about the development for many years. Both of you are Chicagoans, but the south side was for decades. It was the largest black neighborhood in the United States. It is the capital of Black.

Atlanta, for like a bunch of Atlanta's. I would get mad at that. But, like, you know, the estuarians to which all the rivers of the great migration flowed. It's part of the reason Barack Obama was drawn to it, right, when he was, like, working through these big questions of identities, where he met Michelle, obviously. You know, I did stories back then, you know, about why the first black president came from the south side of Chicago.

because I am serious when I say Chicago is the capital of black America. You look at, you know, Black History Month founded here, black studies, you know, all the, you know, the different ways that things have converged here in the heartland. Like, can you talk about if you lived in the South Side during his presidency? Like, I've read about and heard about how there was like, you know, a secret service detail on the block, right, that he and Michelle used to live on. Was there other ways in which his sort of, like, president's physically felt in the space of the South Side of Chicago? when he was in the White House?

Well, I used to live on Greenwood, the same street as the Obama's. Neighbors. Two blocks away. We moved there. Did you borrow sugar from them? No, they were in the White House by the time. We moved there. Also, Sam.

Oh, were? You were on Greenwood, too? I was on 53rd in Greenwood, yeah. They were on 502. I was on 52nd in Greenwood. Neighbors, yeah. Neighbors, yeah. You can borrow sugar from each other, if not from the Obamas.

So, you know, when the Obamas were in 10, I remember one time I had a flat tire. I'm trying to come home. And the police are like, you can't come down this block because I wasn't on the list. I'm like, but do you see, I have this flat tire? And I had to drive all the way around to try to get home. You know, it was an inconvenience,

but it wasn't, like, they weren't there a lot. Yeah. And when they were, you could just go to Veloys, which is his favorite diner and sometimes meet him, which was a fun way to meet him. So, I don't know. It was kind of cool to get to meet him that way. You met your neighbor Obama at some point?

Both of you bumped into him at the time? A couple times. Oh, wow. A couple times. I've met him the capacity as being a journalist. Not just as a neighbor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was a certain ownership that people felt.

They saw him. They knew him. This wasn't something that was abstract. Yeah. And, like, globally, too, whenever you travel and if you say that you're, from Chicago, any taxi driver, whatever, would be like, Obama. You'd be like, yeah, that is my neighbor.

Like, it was exciting in that way, and the merch game was unmatched. It's still Oprah, Michael, Obama. What do you remember about how people talked about the Obama presidency in the city back when he was in the White House? Like, what was the vibe? I would say mostly excitement.

You know, there's 2008, and then there's 2016. But, you know, I was a reporter the whole time of his presidency. And, yeah, I just, I think it was exciting. And then, you know, you have folks, black folks, not just black folks who, you know, just really don't believe in the imperialist nature of a presidency. So, you know, I heard some of that. You know, sometimes things were a little unfair, you know, questioning his motives or. you know, who he is. And then there are, you know, other critiques that are rooted in policy and understanding

that the empire knows no color. But, Mara, you were pretty young during the Obama presidency. Now you work with younger people who probably don't remember a pre-Obama America, right? So, like, how do the people in the neighborhood you work with talk about or think about his legacy to you? there's honestly something kind of amazing about the fact that having a black president was not like considered remarkable to them like when i would talk to students a lot about high school students about voting or like take them to vote once they turned 18 oh you would take them to vote yeah that was like part of what i did um and then if they didn't want to vote i would like interview them about why just to like understand their like interest in civics or disinterest and i think there was overall not an interest in voting, in part because the students I worked with, their interaction with the government in general was through the lens of just being policed every day and having police

in their school, police around their school, cop cars waiting outside of Hyde Park Academy every day expecting a fight. And so to them, it's like participating in voting or anything was like just the same thing as interacting with the police. And so Obama kind of fell into that too. He visited Hyde Park Academy a few times. That was cool. Like, it's cool. He's very nice, right? Like, he's a celebrity. But there wasn't this feeling of like, oh, me too. I could be like that. For sure. I mean, for those of us who are not from the Shah, who don't have a sense of the geography there, like, how would you describe the specific area that the Obama Center is located? For people who aren't from Chicago, the south side is like this blank amorphous term. But it's the largest

geographic part of the city. So it is in Jackson Park, which, you know, it's near the Woodlawn neighborhood, which is a black neighborhood. My mother grew up in West Woodlawn. This is where Lorraine Hansberry's father bought a house. That was the inspiration for a Raisin in the Sun. I would say that the park is more of a Southside Park rather than just a Woodlawn Park. Woodlawn is just out of the University of Chicago, so there have always been housing tensions that are there. Housing tensions because the University of Chicago is a well-resourced school and so much of the south side of Chicago, where it is, it's like working class, middle-class, black families, and all the sort of friction and drag that comes on housing for black folks.

Yeah. One thing I'd love to mention about the geography of where the Obama Center sits is that it kind of straddles this extremely wealthy part of Hyde Park. And then you cross this park and then you're at Hyde Park Academy, which like Natalie said is actually in Woodlawn. And so quickly you shift from like wealthy Hyde Park into a much lower income area. There's affordable housing right around there that has been kind of under threat and a lot of tenant unions have been organizing around it. The other thing I'd say to these observations about how Jackson Park has been used and cherished over the years. is I remember when the Obama Center was deciding on where they were going to build.

And one of the advocates for building it in Jackson Park was the president's advisor, David Axelrod. And I remember he famously said that nobody uses Jackson Park and that this would bring people to Jackson Park. And that, like, I continue to feel and hear that in my head every time I'm in Jackson Park biking through for the cherry blossoms, going to the house music picnic. Yeah, but there's some invisible lines. within the park on who was going where I never go to the cherry blossoms because I always forget. Right, right, right. They're also there for like three days. Yeah, I'm not opposed to them.

So I always miss the window. But have I taken my daughter on the swings? Yes. Do I go to the beach? Yes. Yeah, people love Jackson Park and have been using it for a long time. And it's just an important thing to think about when you think of what this impact will be. When he says nobody, he's like,

So he means certain nobodies, right? Yeah, exactly. He means, like, tourists. So Natalie, you've been down to the new centers. You've seen the Obama-Lisk as these tractors. I've called it. You've seen the new center. What do you think of it?

So I've been covering this story since before the site was even picked. So you have like a long-a-to-no view on like this. Yes. I would say the campus itself is beautiful. There's a lot of open space and winding walking paths. There's a beautiful public library branch. There's gardens. There's a lagoon, and then there's Lake Michigan on the other side.

So you can walk from one space to the other. You know, some of the architecture critics here were skeptical of the building because nothing is that tall. Oh. But now that it's done, there's a sense of, okay, I see how all of this works. I guess I'll finally say having a building like this so big in a community or swath of a community that's not used to it, you know, is a little, it's jarring. But people also point out like there's this wonderful Picasso statue in Daly Plaza

that was when it was built decades ago. people hated it. They're like, this is ugly. Why is this here? We need to replace it. And now it is beloved. So I do think over time, we might see some different opinions on how this space looks. But I would say from a campus perspective, it's beautiful. The playground looks really cool. Oh, yeah. And like my biggest fear about the architecture or like frustration rather is, is, is the playground that the Hyde Park Academy students would play on was across the street, and they built home court over that. And I know that that campus will be heavily policed. And I'm like, well, where are they going to play? And so my hope is that the new playground, which does look dope, like, that that's space

that the kids can come to. Have you been, Mara? Have you been down to the Obama Center? I have not been inside of it, no. I've, like, looked around the campus, but I have not been inside. Gotcha. The thing you said now is interesting is like the way that's sort of when things are sort of habituated into the landscape in these ways. Like, you know, I remember thinking about the Vietnam War Memorial.

It was like hated when it was the first like introduced on the Washington Mall, right? And that was like this sort of like almost like the paragon of how you should do something that's like that somber. And so many of the reviews I've been reading about the Obama Center have been kind of almost necessarily in conversation with the Trump moment. And it's like, oh, I wonder how people will think about the way this place looks when we are further removed from this particular. moment. Do you have any sense of like how the area around Obama Center will be police? So it is supposed to be public. But you know. What I am interested in seeing is what does that public look like? Outside of the Obama Center, there's so much policing at the beach. And I know people are thinking, what are you

talking about? Yes, Chicago has lots of beaches because Lake Michigan is a sea. It is not a placid lake. You cannot see the other side. So, you know, there's already a heavy police presence in public park. So, yes, I will be curious to see what this is like. Yeah, I think this summer in particular, I'm interested and anxious to see what the policing will be like, because in the neighborhood of Hyde Park and the beaches that Natalie is describing, the police presence has dramatically intensified as the weather has gotten warmer. There is a lot of fear around groups of black teenagers just gathering. And it is pretty stark the difference in how people are policed in that area.

So I'm excited to hear that, you know, we're all supposed to be able to use the park grounds. And I think that it'll be really beautiful. And the summer, I think, will be a contentious time. tends to be a contentious time. When we come back. I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of like the affordability crisis and the displacement. Stay with us, y'all.

Jean, just Gene for this part. Code Switch. And we're talking about the impact of the opening of the Obama Presidential Center on the south side of Chicago. So I'm talking to some locals, Mariquaja, a writer and organizer who has worked with students at the school kind of next door to the center and the journalist Natalie Moore. Natalie, you have been following this, obviously,

from the moment this center was announced, right? You've been following the story for a while. And, you know, from the beginning, there's been all these concerns around, like, what putting the Obama Center in this location would do to the rest of the neighborhood. There's been really intense pushback from people in the neighborhood,

from organizers trying to stop it from being built. Like, could you talk about the universe of concerns that they had in the early stages when this was like, in the sort of gestational stages of the Centerbane Belt? You know, one of the stories that I did early on was there was a lot of concern that this was going to be a land grab for the University of Chicago. Yeah, that was one of the things I heard to, yeah. Yeah.

And so a project that I did with another reporter was we created a boundary and said, let's see who the biggest landholder is in Eastwood Line. And it was not the University of Chicago. It was actually the city of Chicago because these were vacant lots, houses that were torn down property that the city inherited. So the city really had more of the power to help shape because of what they owned. So that was the big takeaway.

And I remember doing that story, the late Maddie Butler, a housing organizer, did affordable housing, said, there is enough room for everybody. in this community because there's so much vacancy that people don't have to leave, there's no need for displacement because there's so much to build on.

Totally. And Ms. Butler and the tenant unions that she worked with, they really did say throughout their 10-year campaign that we're not anti-Obama center. Like, we just want to be able to stay here to enjoy it. And that's also what the young people at Hyde Park had said over the past 10 years. of interviewing them was like we feel like we're going to be pushed out or our families are

to be pushed out. Like it seems really cool. I hope my younger siblings get to enjoy it. Have we seen any of that happen? Like, have we seen people displaced? Have we seen housing prices go up? So, yeah. So the Illinois Answers Project recently put out a story that had some really helpful data.

In the past 10 years, the median sale price of a single family home in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times. So the real estate speculation has been dramatic. If you're just browsing on Zillow, you'll see homes for a million dollars in woodlawn. So, yes, people have been displaced. I'm curious about how the Obama Foundation was responding to all these complaints, right, to all this sort of pushback they were getting from South Siders? Not much.

They've stayed on message about this is development for the community. We want to be on the South Side. This community is important to us. It's near where Michelle Obama grew up. It's addressing some of the things that she's. said that she didn't see as a kid. And I also think that they were able to punt because, like I said, the city owns so much of the property. Like they could say, it's not our response. It's like, this is not our questions to solve. Yeah. And I would just say in general, you know,

just to broaden this out, like outside is so expensive. Like Woodlawn is not the only neighborhood that is suffering from affordability issues. You know, the city hasn't been able to pass other measures that housing advocates have wanted. Like rent is really high. You know, there is a citywide housing crisis that is going on. And there are very few neighborhoods that are exempt from that. Right. I'm curious about when people are organizing, you know,

and push you back on the Obama administration, there's like the singular affective representational power of the Obama presidency, right? for black folks in particular. And I imagine part of what the organizers had to deal with was also just people who rock with the Obamas, who were like Obama fans. Was that a dynamic that was present on the ground? Like, where people, were there, Obama stands for like a better word who were sort of like,

like, A, A, A, not too much of my president. You know what I mean? I would say, yeah, I wouldn't say they were organizing. But I do think that even people that love Obama and that love the center have not been able to argue with the facts of, like, the affordability crisis and the displacement. Some people want the displacement also. There's a lot of hatred of poor working class people. I think there are like not just developers, but I do think there are people who are like, yeah, I don't want that housing to be so close to the Obama Center.

I think that's been a hard legacy in some ways of Chicago's public housing crisis since demolishing high-rise public housing. I think there's just a lot of feeling of like, I don't want people who are in public housing to be in my neighborhood. Like, why are they here now? And that's something that I have noticed in talking with people. But I would also love to add that I think one thing I did notice in terms of people feeling activated around the housing campaign, whether or not they got deeply involved, I think one of the things that made people more sympathetic to it was in the early days of the campaign, I think this is 2017. President Obama said in a conference, like one of those community meetings. And he was directly asked about if the Obama Center

would sign on to a CBA Community Benefits Agreement. What's the CBA for those of us who don't know? Yeah, a community benefits agreement is basically like a package piece of legislation that provides protections that are negotiated around like housing or jobs, some set of agreements with the community. And so sometimes a CBA can be about environmental concerns. That's been a, that's a conversation right now in another part of the city. But the Obama CBA was specifically around housing protections. Michelle and I, as residents of the community, as people who have worked and lived there for a very long time, feel very confident in our ability to make sure that we have a very inclusive process where everybody has their say. And he basically was like, you guys, broadly speaking,

He was like, there's no community organization that speaks for all the community. We know what's best. You should trust us. And he just shut it down. That's very fascinating considering he is a community organizer famously, right? He would have been one of the people maybe on the other side of this in a different lifetime. I've been there. You know, I used to be the organizer.

But I remember for me it was jarring. It was really jarring to hear him. just flat out refuse to engage with organizers. And I think a lot of people like me were also kind of taken aback by it. Natalie, from the outside, this seems kind of like, you know, your classic gentrification

and revitalization story. Like, you got this person wants to build something, they have deep pockets, they want to build something in the neighborhood, and that building might speed up the rise of housing costs, speed up displacement. But in this case, the deep-pocketed developer person

is the first black president. Is that too simple a framing here? I would say yes. This may be going on a tangent, so just bear with me here. Black Southside neighborhoods in particular have been stripped away and also starved from investment. So when things do come to a neighborhood, there are concerns about who was this for. When I have heard organizers say this is a wholesale attempt by the Obamas to just push us out, they don't want us here, I don't agree with that sentiment. I think that's going too far. My take has been that there's a lot of overstating on all sides. There are not white yuppies who are dying to move to Woodlawn to live by the Obama Center. I also don't think that the Obama Center is going to spur this renaissance of black-owned businesses on 63rd Street either.

And, you know, Gene, you and I have talked about this gentrification is a fraught word because it often does not happen in black neighborhoods. Right. So what does that look like here to have a beautiful development, but making sure everybody gets to use? it. I think that there are some bolder things the foundation could have done given Barack Obama's legacy as a community organizer. Michelle Obama grew up in South Shore. They got married at the South Shore Cultural Center. You know, they lived near the community. So I think their intent is not, we're building this so we can push black people out. That said, if you do feel left behind in this country or this city and neighborhood, I understand that more protections are needed.

I also want to highlight the pushback from a white-led group called Protect Our Parks. Okay. Their issue was, we don't think this should be built on park land. That was just their fundamental feeling. I was reading about this. And this group kept suing, and the courts kept throwing it out. And, you know, there was a final ruling in 2018 that said, this isn't going to happen. So when I see a white-led group called Protect Our Parks that doesn't advocate for equity otherwise, that is a very intentional curious.

choice to me. I appreciate you bringing that distinction up because I think that that was part of the reason that the housing campaign had to be so strong in its messaging about saying yes, Obama Center, no displacement. Because in media, specifically national

media, it's hard to make that distinction of not all these people organizing around issues related to the center are on the same page. And I know that they've had to turn down interviews from outlets that are kind of secretly right wing because they're like, wait, what's the angle on why they're trying to be

critical of the center? It makes it really hard to talk about this, which is why I think, even Natalie and I are being like so careful with our words too, because I don't, as well, I just never wanted to be like disrespectful because I know also how much this does mean to so many people. It means, I like really can't understate like how excited so many people really deeply are. And how many black family reunions are going to be coming here every summer? A thousand percent. Like, it's going to be a site of pilgrimage for a lot of people who, like, you know, if my mom and I find myself in Chicago, she's going to be on our list.

As it should be. And then also the people that live around there, like, I'm like, I'm sure I'll take the kids I babysit to go play on that playground. That's going to be the nicest playground in the area. Like, absolutely. So, you know, I'm always like, I don't want what I'm saying, this ideally nuanced critique to become fodder for a white supremacist to just. hates Obama. Well, I mean, to that point,

and I mean, this Obama Center is coming into being on Juneteeth at a time when, again, the vibe friends, the vibes are trash. They're absolutely trash. Democratic voters are pissed at Trump. They're just as angry at Democrats in Washington. In a decade since he left office, like that Obama era hope is increasingly hard to feel. And like the most cutting appraisals of his presidency are coming from the left, like, not

just the right. So how does a building dedicated to office? optimism around democracy in the American project. Like, how does that land differently right now for y'all? So I haven't been inside yet, but I will say that friends of a variety of backgrounds that have gotten a preview of the center all said that they cried and that basically that it felt like the promise of 2015. And so you just feel this stark contrast between like how bad the vibes are in

26 and like what so many of us believe to still be possible. in 2015. And the contrast sounds devastating, but yeah, I'm curious, is that how you felt about it, too, Natalie, that it felt like it was a monument to how we felt in 2015? Yeah, so I put, so the piece that I wrote after the press day was a take about what does it mean to have a museum talking about democracy when democracy is falling apart. And I think we should, we keep saying Jackson Park, we haven't said who it's named after. The park is named after Andrew Jackson. I was wondering about that.

A slave holding president. Mm-hmm. So there are these interesting juxtapositions that are there. So it's so hard not to think about Trump's presidency in this moment. The museum opens not with the Obamas, but with other struggles like suffragists, labor movement. you know, Black Panthers. So they are talking about movements that have worked and have also floundered before you even get into the Obama story. So I think that the museum is really designed for people gets to have some nostalgia and think about that moment of hope.

But to leave there and feel like they can do something, no matter how small. it is, especially given the moment. Now, they're not, they don't ever say the word Trump. And when you ask, you know, don't even ask them that. Just talk about democracy. But that is, that is their way. And they have to know that people are thinking about this. Natalie Moore, Mara Quadra. Thank you for talking to us. I appreciate you. Thanks for having us. So good to see you guys and both of you. By the way, we reached out to the Abolment Foundation for comment, but we did not hear back from them in time for this episode.

And y'all, that is our show. And just a reminder that you can follow Code Switch wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. This episode was produced by Jess Kung. It was edited by Courtney Stein. It was engineered by Quasi Lee. And thank you to Myra Quaja and the Invisible Institute for sharing some of the interviews they did with students from Hyde Park Academy. And we would be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massif. That's Christina Kala and Xavier Ler.

Lopez and Dalia Mortata and Leah Dinella and Martin Girdwood and Meyer Dangerfield and Yolanda Sanguyen. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. And I'm B.A. Parker. Be easy, y'all.