As the Obama Presidential Center continues building and construction near Chicago’s South Shore area, numerous low-income citizens are asking the city for security over worries that real estate tax, insurance, and interest rates will escalate as the community modifications to a more high end area.
Many citizens of the Woodlawn and South Shore areas fear being eliminated of their homes due to rising rents and house prices as the area changes once the Obama Center opens, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The City Council has actually already enacted a regulation that they hope will secure legacy locals that the Obama Center will affect. But the Union for a Neighborhood Advantages Arrangement, a group formed to care for the interests of enduring residents, desires more.
The group says that some locals have been excluded of the city’s plan, and they want those homeowners and tenants included. Citizens are “afraid that South Shore one day is going to look like Hyde Park, however none people are going to be here anymore,” task creator Eva Maria Lewis told the paper.
“Nobody here is attempting to stop the Obama Center,” organizer Dixon Romeo added.
However activists are most anxious that black citizens will be slowly pushed out of the communities where the first black president is building his eponymous complex.
Some of the demands include launching a large public housing program in the areas to make the locations less attractive to high-income households; measures to avoid displacement; and caps on fees, taxes, and other costs for homeowners– including building owners, occupants, and single-family homeowners– and other steps.
The Obama Center– it isn’t a “presidential library” like other such installations since Obama will not house his papers and records there– has actually stirred trouble in other areas, as well. Considering That the City board allowed Obama to start constructing his building in Jackson Park, a number of suits were filed to stop the project. At problem are park guidelines that once stated that no new building developments were permitted on parklands.
In 2018, Safeguard Our Parks, a Chicago not-for-profit, filed a suit in federal court to block building of the Obama Center, declaring the organizers diverted the center’s purpose far from operating as a presidential library.
In spite of the suits and Obama’s guarantee not to materially alter the park until after settling the concerns, Obama began ripping out hundred-year-old trees in the park the same year the suits were first filed.
The lawsuits postponed the groundbreaking for the Obama Center till this year. A cutting-edge ceremony was finally held this September.
Still, even as some suits continue to wind through the courts, a federal judge just recently rejected a request to halt construction of the center and is allowing the strategies to go forward.
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