By The Obama Presidential Center, an $850 million complex rising in Jackson Park and slated to open in April 2026, has become a lightning rod for controversy. Touted by its backers as a cultural and civic hub, the 19.3-acre project is instead drawing fire from residents and community leaders who warn it is accelerating gentrification and uprooting the very people it claims to serve.
Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor, a longtime Obama supporter who represents the area, has been outspoken in her criticism. “We’re going to see rents go higher and we’re going to see families displaced,” Taylor told The Daily Mail. She blasted the lack of a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA), which could have guaranteed affordable housing and local hiring. “Every time large development comes to communities, they displace the very people they say they want to improve it for,” she said.
The center, financed through the Obama Foundation with contributions from billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey, has already more than doubled in cost—soaring from $350 million to $830 million—and suffered repeated delays since its original 2021 target opening. Critics, among them Illinois Senate candidate and South Side native Tyrone Muhammad, argue the project is out of step with its surroundings. Calling it “disingenuous” and a “Tower of Babel,” Muhammad charged that it “violates common decency,” citing the loss of publc parkland without community consent.
Other locals have been equally blunt. Attorney Ken Woodard, 39, denounced the project as a “monstrosity” that overshadows the neighborhood and inflates costs. “It’s over budget, it’s taking way too long to finish, and it’s going to drive up prices,” he said. Residents like Kyana Butler, 30, see those price spikes firsthand. She noted that rents for two-bedroom apartments have doubled from $800 to $1,800. “Property taxes are going up so much that the owner of my building is saying she might just walk away,” Butler warned.
Strange, over budget Obama library pic.twitter.com/WgDpmmztoM
— RIDER-X (@RiderRiderZeke) August 18, 2025
The design itself—dominated by a 225-foot museum tower, community spaces, and a new Chicago Public Library branch—has stirred further resentment. On social media, detractors dismiss it as a “concrete tomb” and a “monument to megalomania.” Unlike past presidential libraries, the Obama Center will not house paper archives but rely on digital records, raising additional questions about its role and legacy. Even a construction foreman, speaking anonymously, likened the building to “a bomb shelter” with its thick walls and blast-rated windows.
Have you seen the hideous, gigantic Obama Library in Chicago?
It's a monument to excess, megalomania, awful taste, and propaganda.
See my new doc, shot on site… https://t.co/codumogGjU pic.twitter.com/1cXWIIIs38
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) July 21, 2025
The Obama Foundation has pushed back, promising a “welcoming, vibrant campus” complete with a vegetable garden and playground. “We are proud that members of the community played key roles in building the center,” a spokeswoman said, highlighting job opportunities it will generate. Yet with luxury developments like a planned 26-story hotel rising nearby, many fear the project will speed the displacement of the South Side’s low-income Black residents.
As construction advances, the debate intensifies. To some, the Obama Presidential Center is a triumph of investment and vision; to others, it is a looming monument to exclusion that threatens to transform the South Side beyond recognition.
[Read More: MSNBC Has Major Rebrand It’s A Disaster]
