Obama's $850 million presidential center delivers rising rents, not real hope, to Chicago's South Side

An $850 million monument is about to open in Jackson Park, Illinois, and the people who live in its shadow say they are worse off for it. That is the blunt verdict from Pastor Corey Brooks, a South Side Chicago community leader who has spent years doing the kind of ground-level work that politicians promise and rarely deliver. His recent opinion piece draws a sharp contrast between Barack Obama's gleaming presidential center and the scrappy, community-built alternative Brooks runs just blocks away, and the comparison is not kind to the former president.

Brooks, the founder and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago and CEO of Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny), has earned the nickname "the Rooftop Pastor" the hard way. He once spent 94 days on a rooftop in protest and, on another occasion, 343 consecutive days, both vigils aimed at drawing attention to the violence and neglect choking Chicago's South Side neighborhoods. He is not a pundit parachuting in from a cable studio. He lives in the wreckage.

His argument is simple and hard to dismiss: the Obama Presidential Center is a monument built for the powerful, and it is disrupting the lives of the powerless. Meanwhile, Project H.O.O.D. converted a building once synonymous with prostitution, drugs, and murder into the Robert R. McCormick Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center, a facility Brooks describes as "homegrown and being built by the community for the community."

Rising rents, doubling property values, and displacement

The numbers Brooks cites, attributed to Chicago Sun-Times reporting, paint a grim picture for longtime residents of Woodlawn and South Shore. Since the Obama Presidential Center was announced, rents have climbed, property values near the site have doubled, and Airbnb listings have proliferated. For homeowners sitting on appreciating property, that might sound like good news. For renters, the majority of residents in these neighborhoods, it means displacement.

Brooks put it plainly:

"Our community doesn't need more monuments or political nostalgia."

That line cuts to the core of a pattern conservatives have watched repeat itself for decades. A Democratic leader builds something grand, the media celebrates it, and the people who were supposed to benefit get pushed out by the economic forces the project unleashes. The promises made when the project was announced, jobs, investment, community uplift, remain unfulfilled, according to Brooks. What arrived instead was higher costs of living and continued violence.

Obama came to Chicago's South Side as a community organizer. He served as an Illinois state senator. He became the first Black president of the United States. And then he built an $850 million facility in the neighborhood he once organized, a facility that, by Brooks's account, has brought "immense harm before its doors even open." That quote comes from a social media video Brooks described encountering recently, one that contrasted his work with the presidential center's impact. A commenter in the same video called Brooks "the hero Chicago needs" and added: "Give us more Pastor Corey. Less Obama."

What Project H.O.O.D. built without $850 million

The contrast Brooks draws is not abstract. Project H.O.O.D. operates in what the pastor describes as former "O-Block" territory, a stretch he calls "the most dangerous block in America." The organization took a building that had been a hub of criminal activity and turned it into a center that trains people for jobs, interrupts violence, and builds economic opportunity from the inside out.

No $850 million budget. No presidential branding. No celebrity ribbon-cutting. Just a pastor who says he has "buried too many young men" and "counseled too many fathers locked out by bad choices and broken systems."

Brooks's broader point deserves attention from anyone who cares about the gap between political symbolism and on-the-ground results. Obama continues to headline Democratic campaigns and shape the party's direction from a comfortable distance. His presidential center will bear his name and burnish his legacy. But the people of Woodlawn and South Shore are not props in a legacy project. They are families facing rising rents and the same violence that plagued them before a single shovel hit the dirt in Jackson Park.

Top-down symbolism versus bottom-up results

The dynamic Brooks identifies is not unique to Chicago. Across the country, progressive leaders have favored large, visible, top-down projects, stadiums, cultural centers, transit hubs, that generate press coverage and photo opportunities but leave surrounding communities to absorb the costs. The pattern is familiar: announce the project, promise jobs and investment, break ground, watch property values spike, and then move on while longtime residents scramble to keep up.

What Brooks offers as an alternative is unglamorous by comparison. Mentorship. Job training. Violence interruption. Discipline. Work. These are the things he says communities actually need. As he wrote:

"Real hope isn't imported. It's forged right here."

That sentence should be uncomfortable for every politician who has ever flown into a struggling neighborhood, announced a shiny initiative, and flown back out. It is especially uncomfortable for a former president whose entire political brand was built on the word "hope."

The media's long habit of treating Obama's every move as historic and unassailable makes Brooks's critique all the more striking. Here is a Black pastor, working in one of the most violent corridors in America, telling the country that the first Black president's legacy project is hurting the very people it was supposed to help. That is not a talking point from a Republican opposition researcher. It is a firsthand report from a man who has spent years on rooftops and in funeral homes.

Unfulfilled promises and unanswered questions

Brooks references "unfulfilled promises" tied to the Obama Presidential Center's announcement, though he does not catalog them individually. The broader record is worth examining. What specific commitments were made to Woodlawn and South Shore residents when the project was unveiled? What community benefit agreements, if any, were signed? And has the Obama Foundation responded publicly to the displacement concerns and rent increases documented by the Chicago Sun-Times?

None of those questions are answered in Brooks's piece, and that itself is telling. If the Obama Foundation had a robust rebuttal, data showing local hiring, affordable housing protections, or measurable crime reduction tied to the center, one would expect it to be part of the public conversation by now.

Instead, the conversation is dominated by a pastor who converted a crack house into a job-training center and a former president whose $850 million monument is pushing families out of their homes.

The ongoing influence of Obama's political legacy extends well beyond Chicago, but the South Side is where the rubber meets the road. It is where the man built his career, where he claimed to understand the struggles of working-class Black families, and where his most expensive project is now making life harder for those same families.

A tale of two builders

Brooks closed his piece with a direct appeal:

"Don't pin your hopes on another outsider's monument."

The word "outsider" is pointed. Obama was born in Hawaii. He came to Chicago's South Side, used it as a political launchpad, ascended to the highest office in the world, and returned to build a monument, to himself. Brooks, by contrast, stayed. He buried the dead. He mentored the fatherless. He slept on rooftops in Chicago winters to raise money and awareness.

The difference between the two men is not partisan. It is structural. One built a career on a community's pain and then built a monument. The other built a center that trains people to escape the pain. One cost $850 million. The other cost years of sweat and funerals.

Conservative critics have long argued that the Democratic Party's relationship with Black communities is transactional, that leaders extract votes and loyalty in exchange for symbolism, speeches, and projects that benefit developers and political legacies more than residents. Brooks's account is the most vivid recent illustration of that critique, and it comes from inside the community, not from the outside looking in.

When the Obama Presidential Center finally opens its doors, the cameras will roll, the speeches will soar, and the coverage will be reverential. A few blocks away, Pastor Brooks will still be doing the work that no monument can replace, training young men for jobs, interrupting cycles of violence, and burying the ones he could not reach in time.

Monuments are for legacies. Communities need something the powerful rarely offer: someone who stays.