Since 2015, the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition made up of South Shore, Woodlawn and Hyde Park neighborhood residents has been sounding the alarm on the threat of displacement and gentrification in communities surrounding the Obama Presidential Center. We’ve urged the city to take action to address it. In 2019, we won a community benefits agreement, or CBA, ordinance covering Woodlawn — but South Shore, the neighborhood immediately south of Jackson Park, remains unprotected.
Now, a new study confirms why protections are so desperately needed — and why Mayor Lori Lightfoot needs to act if she is serious about racial equity and preventing more displacement of Black families in Chicago.
An analysis of Zillow real estate data published in December shows that in the third quarter of 2022, an incredible 32% of homes purchased in South Shore were bought not by families looking for housing — but by investors. That number is nearly twice the percentage in 2015, when the Obama center was announced, and nearly five times the percentage in 2010, and it was the highest percentage of investor-purchased homes of any neighborhood in the city. The study was published just days after news broke that Pangea, the largest landlord in South Shore and a defendant in a class-action lawsuit brought by tenants, had sold its entire citywide portfolio to another major real estate investment firm in New York. Pangea’s properties include dozens of buildings and hundreds of units in South Shore.
We’ve seen this story play out time and again in Black and other minority neighborhoods around the country, and we know exactly how it goes. Outside real estate speculators swoop into working-class Black neighborhoods they think have “potential” and gobble up the housing stock. They achieve major profits by redeveloping properties, jacking up rents, nickel-and-diming tenants on rental fees and skimping on maintenance, all while causing massive displacement and pricing Black families out of their own homes and communities.
It’s already happening in South Shore, and we see the impact on our neighbors and loved ones. Single mothers priced out of the neighborhood by exorbitant rent increases. Seniors on fixed income who risk losing their homes due to property tax increases they can’t afford. Condo owners like me — a senior and South Shore native — whose condo buildings can’t keep up with the cost of repairs or rising property taxes and who are constantly hounded by investors who want to flip our homes for more, making it harder for other families to attain homeownership.
But South Shore is our home, and we want to stay here. We deserve to be able to experience the Obama Presidential Center and the positive changes it will create for our community. But we can’t do that if we can’t afford to live here anymore.
The CBA Coalition has pushed the city to address this threat in South Shore — already the No. 1 neighborhood in Chicago for evictions for nearly the last decade, with a median income of less than $36,000 a year and where the majority of residents are housing cost-burdened. But the city has refused, instead responding with piecemeal programs that fall far short of what’s needed to prevent neighborhoodwide displacement and protect South Shore residents.
Our coalition has proposed a robust, comprehensive plan of 18 policy steps the city can take to protect renters and homeowners from displacement caused by rising rents, property taxes and ownership costs and to preserve affordable housing and ensure that new development in the neighborhood includes an adequate amount of it.
Chicago lost 85,000 Black people — around 10% of its total Black population — in the decade between 2010 and 2020, according to the 2020 census. Housing costs are among the top reasons cited by Black people for why they leave. Black people aren’t merely leaving Chicago — we are being priced out and pushed out. And the Obama Presidential Center has the potential to become one of the biggest engines of displacement of Black people in the city if nothing is done to prevent it.
If Lightfoot is serious about pursuing racial equity and ensuring that Chicago remains a livable city for Black people, she needs to act now to pass a CBA ordinance for South Shore before it’s too late.
South Shore families can’t wait any longer.
Linda Jennings is a member of the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition.
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