Residents of Chicago’s South Side are reportedly being displaced as home and rent prices soar around the area close to the construction site of the $500 million Obama Presidential Center.
Since the Obama Presidential Center was announced in 2015, residents of Chicago’s South Side have seen a dramatic increase in costs of living. Rents have increased as much as 43 percent and home values more than 130 percent over that span, the Washington Post reported. More than 50% higher than the U.S. average, the increases have worked to “exacerbate existing affordability challenges for many low-income residents of Woodlawn and South Shore,” Professor William Sites of the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago, told the outlet.The increase has forced many residents out of their homes, as developers and real estate investors have moved in to snatch up pieces of now-prime real estate. “I get these phone calls almost every day, like, ‘Are you looking to sell your home?’” Linda Jennings, 73, a retired nurse who has lived in her South Shore condominium for nearly 20 years, told the Washington Post. “I tell them no, because this is my home.”Lifelong South Shore resident Tahiti Hamer, 42, was forced to vacate her home last year after her landlord raised her rent by nearly 40 percent. A single mother of three, Hamer urged the landlord to negotiate the rent to make it more affordable for her. “She said, ‘Oh, you know, the area is changing. My taxes have gone up,’” Hamer recalled to the Washington Post “So, that’s it, then. I’m a working mother who can’t afford to live in my own community that I’ve lived in for 42 years.”
