The Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, Illinois, will soon open its doors to the public, an $850 million project that promises jobs and visitors to Chicago's battered South Side. But for the families in Woodlawn, South Shore, and surrounding neighborhoods who have watched the project take shape, the center's arrival has so far delivered rising rents, displacement fears, and a familiar pattern: grand promises from political leaders who moved on long ago.
That is the assessment of Pastor Corey Brooks, founder and CEO of Project H.O.O.D. (Helping Others Obtain Destiny) and senior pastor of New Beginnings Church of Chicago. In a commentary published by Fox News, Brooks laid out a sharp critique of the presidential center and of Barack Obama's broader relationship with the communities that helped launch his political career.
Brooks, known nationally as the "Rooftop Pastor" after staging 94-day and 343-day rooftop vigils to draw attention to violence on the South Side, did not hold back. He described the center as "a gleaming monument to one man's legacy" and argued that its real-world effects on surrounding neighborhoods have been negative since the project was first announced.
Brooks pointed to reporting by the Chicago Sun-Times showing that rents near the center's site have been climbing, property values have roughly doubled, and Airbnb listings have increased. Longtime residents, he wrote, fear displacement, pushed out of neighborhoods they have called home for decades as outside investment chases proximity to a gleaming new landmark.
None of this is abstract for the people who live in Woodlawn or South Shore. These are communities where families already struggle with violence and economic stagnation. The promise of a presidential center was supposed to help. Instead, Brooks argues, the project has accelerated gentrification pressures without delivering the economic opportunity residents were told to expect.
The pattern is worth examining. A massive public-facing project arrives in a distressed neighborhood. Officials promise revitalization. Property values spike. Rents follow. The original residents, the ones the project was supposed to serve, find themselves priced out. The jobs and visitors materialize for someone, but not necessarily for the people who were already there.
It is a dynamic that plays out across American cities, and it raises a pointed question: who, exactly, is the Obama Presidential Center for?
Brooks offered a blunt answer. Obama, he wrote, "first came to these streets as a community organizer," then served as an Illinois state senator, then became the first Black president of the United States. Born in Hawaii, Obama built his political identity on the South Side, but Brooks characterized that relationship as transactional.
"The South Side wasn't his home, it was his launching pad," Brooks wrote. He described Obama's connection to the area as "carpetbagging dressed up in hope and change rhetoric", the language of a pastor who has spent years working in the very blocks that Obama's biography made famous, and who sees little evidence that the former president's legacy project will change daily life for the people who still live there.
Obama "learned how to use Chicago for his ambitions," Brooks argued. He "built a compelling story here, then moved on to higher office." The presidential center, in this telling, is less a gift to the community than a capstone on a personal narrative, one that leverages the South Side's struggles without meaningfully addressing them.
This is not the first time questions have surfaced about the center's development. Reports have previously indicated that Obama pressed for a bigger presidential center, raising internal concerns about the project's scope and direction.
Brooks drew a sharp contrast between the presidential center's top-down approach and the ground-level work he says Project H.O.O.D. has been doing for years. His organization, he wrote, took a building that he described as once full of "prostitution, drugs, murder and ungodliness" and turned it into the Robert R. McCormick Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center.
Project H.O.O.D., Brooks said, is training people for jobs, interrupting violence, and building economic opportunity in what was once O-Block territory, a stretch of the South Side he described as "the most dangerous block in America." The work is unglamorous. It does not generate presidential-library-scale headlines. But Brooks argued it is the kind of effort that actually changes lives.
His broader point cuts deeper than one project or one politician. Brooks argued that young Black Americans need "mentorship, education, discipline and work to overcome adversity", not what he called "top-down, celebrity-driven projects" or "false political hope." Monuments, however expensive, do not mentor teenagers. They do not interrupt shootings. They do not train a single mother for a job that pays enough to cover rent in a neighborhood where property values just doubled.
The critique extends to a broader pattern of contradictions that have followed Obama's post-presidential ventures. The Obama Presidential Center itself requires photo ID for free admission, an irony not lost on observers who have watched Democrats campaign against voter ID requirements for years.
Brooks recounted recently coming across a social media video that featured him. The video included the claim that the Obama Presidential Center has caused "immense harm before its doors even open, displacement, deceit and land theft are its heritage." It also included a line that captured the sentiment Brooks has been building toward for years: "Pastor Corey Brooks is the hero Chicago needs. He is healing, restoring and revitalizing communities. Give us more Pastor Corey. Less Obama."
That framing, more grassroots pastors, fewer legacy monuments, is not a new argument on the right. But it carries particular weight when it comes from a Black pastor who has spent decades on the South Side, who has slept on rooftops in Chicago winters to raise money and awareness, and who can point to a specific building his organization transformed in a specific neighborhood where violence remains a daily reality.
The question Brooks poses is not whether Obama deserves a presidential center. Former presidents build them. It is whether an $850 million facility in a neighborhood full of struggling families will do anything for those families, or whether it will accelerate their displacement while burnishing a legacy that was always more about the man than the place.
Obama's record of prioritizing narrative over accountability is a recurring theme. His public lectures on institutional independence have repeatedly clashed with the record of his own administration. The presidential center fits a similar pattern: soaring rhetoric, impressive architecture, and a community left to wonder when the promises will arrive.
The families in Woodlawn and South Shore did not ask for a monument. They asked for safety, jobs, and the chance to stay in their homes. Brooks argues they are getting none of those things, and that the center's arrival is actively making some of those problems worse.
Rising rents and doubling property values are not abstractions for a family on a fixed income. Displacement is not a policy debate when your landlord raises the rent because the neighborhood is suddenly "up and coming." And the promise of visitors and jobs rings hollow when the visitors come from out of town and the jobs do not go to the people who live across the street.
Brooks' critique also touches on a broader failure of leadership that extends well beyond one former president. Chicago's South Side has been a proving ground for ambitious politicians for generations. The pattern of leaders who use communities as stepping stones and then move on to bigger stages is not unique to Obama, but the scale of the presidential center makes it a particularly vivid example.
The people who live with the consequences of elite ambition rarely get a say in the monument that goes up in their neighborhood. They get to watch the construction, absorb the rent increases, and hope that the promises were real this time.
Eight hundred and fifty million dollars buys a lot of architecture. Whether it buys a single safer block on the South Side is another matter entirely.
