Barack Obama’s presidential library and museum complex is scheduled to open this spring on Chicago’s South Side after a decade of planning, legal fights and cost overruns. It’s set to become the priciest U.S. presidential library, and it's already sparking concerns of driving up real estate costs in the area.
The Obama Presidential Center, about 7 miles south of downtown along Lake Michigan, is on pace to greet visitors in June, the nation’s 44th president recently said while attending an event in Arkansas.
The high-profile project, with an estimated tab of $850 million, was announced in 2015. Set at the gateway of an academic and cultural institution, the University of Chicago, it's expected to serve as a monument and gathering area in recognition of the lone president to emerge from the nation’s third-largest city.
Designed by husband-and-wife architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the complex’s centerpiece is a 225-foot-tall main tower. The 19.3-acre campus is near the Griffin Museum of Science & Industry, a tourist attraction housed in a building from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Jackson Park with its lagoons, cherry trees and Japanese garden.
The Obama Presidential Center is intended to honor the former South Side community organizer and University of Chicago legal scholar. Barack and Michelle Obama are longtime homeowners in the nearby Kenwood neighborhood, though their primary residence is now Washington, D.C.
Funded by thousands of donations, the Jackson Park project has taken longer than the two-term president’s eight years in office, which spanned January 2009 to January 2017, to complete from the initial planning phases.
Delays included lawsuits sparked by the Obama Foundation’s decision to place the center within a National Register-listed park that was designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.
Presidential libraries are privately funded. Individually or through their families or foundations, figures from the worlds of business, sports and entertainment have made major contributions to the Obama project, according to the foundation's website. They include Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Ballmer, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Reid Hoffman and Joe Mansueto.
Obama’s fundraising stands in contrast to that of former President Joe Biden, who is far below the pace of other recent presidents in donations to build a presidential library, according to The New York Times. His foundation is said to be expecting only $11.3 million by 2027.
Impact on residential market
In Chicago, there also have been complaints about the bulkiness of the granite-clad main tower and worries that the presidential center will bring higher property values, taxes and rents that will displace longtime residents.
The city passed the Jackson Park Housing Pilot Ordinance in September, following its 2023 proposal aimed at mitigating the anticipated impact of the presidential center’s opening.
The ordinance offers $5,000 grants for unpaid property tax relief, in addition to earmarking 30 city-owned lots in the greater South Shore area for affordable housing. Current area residents will have priority for leasing.
While Hyde Park has long been a high-priced market for its 217-acre University of Chicago footprint, extending into Kenwood, fears of increased home values and, in turn, property taxes and rents spread to Woodlawn and adjacent communities to the south.
The median home value in Woodlawn, according to CoStar-owned Homes.com data, is about $200,000 less than in Kenwood and Hyde Park. But agent Naja Morris of @properties Christie's International Real Estate expects the area to see a more rapid price growth once the Obama facility opens.
“Woodlawn was already appreciating faster than the overall Chicago market and desirability will continue to be there. It has proximity to the lake, downtown and the University of Chicago campus without being too densely saturated,” Morris said in an email to CoStar News. “Presidential libraries historically bring appreciation that persists over the next 15 years.”
Real estate agent and resident Susan O’Connor Davis of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices noted home sales have increased in the area over the past few years, but she stopped short of attributing that solely to the Obama Center.
“I think the escalation in prices would have happened regardless,” she said in an interview.
Rather, the national trends of rising home prices coming out of the pandemic, in conjunction with the presidential project, have created what she said is still a hot market. Developers’ purchases of cheap lots south of the Midway Plaisance — a mile-long green space that divides the University of Chicago campus — to build modern rowhouses and commercial properties have been ongoing for several years, both Morris and O’Connor Davis noted.
O’Connor Davis said that wealthy home buyers from North Side neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park have moved south seeking larger homes and better schools. They tend to buy more expensive properties, raising median prices.
Trump rant
President Donald Trump weighed in on the Obama Presidential Center in May when he made unexpected remarks during a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
Trump referred to the project as a “disaster” and blamed high costs of the project on “woke” construction workers while incorrectly asserting that work on the project had stopped.
At the time, the Obama Foundation said that Trump’s comments were an apparent reference to a lawsuit between two subcontractors and that the project remained on track for a spring 2026 completion.
Bob Reiter, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, referred to Trump’s comments as a “wildly inaccurate and offensive rant” and said in the same statement that workers on the site were continuing “on an aggressive schedule.”
Project highlights
Obama Presidential Center structures are set to include a museum, auditorium, Chicago Public Library branch and athletic center with NBA-regulation basketball court. The court in that building, separately designed by architecture firm Moody Nolan, can be converted to banquet space.
Designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, outdoor spaces will include gardens, playground equipment, walking paths, sledding hills and lagoon viewing areas.
The main tower is designed to have multiple floors of museum exhibits and programming, along with an already installed 83-foot-tall painted glass window by artist Julie Mehretu on the exterior.
Well before its completion, the gray, hulking, mostly windowless main structure already has been the subject of widespread debate.
Chicago Sun-Times architecture columnist Lee Bey described the unfinished tower as appearing “funereal enough to fit in at another historic South Side greensward,” the Oak Woods Cemetery.
The Obama Foundation didn’t provide comment on Bey’s remarks.
But Kim Patterson, CEO of the Obama Foundation, in a December tour of the site with CBS News Chicago, said the lack of windows was intentional "because sunlight is just not a friend to the artwork and the artifacts that are going inside of the building."
At the top of the tower will be words spoken by Obama during a 2015 speech honoring the 50th anniversary of civil rights marchers’ crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. His words, in concrete letters, will be visible to guests looking out from the Nelson Mandela Skyroom on the top level of the tower.
“The Obama Presidential Center will be a lively community hub, economic anchor, and beacon of democracy right here on the South Side of Chicago,” according to a description on the center’s website. “We are excited to welcome visitors — whether they’re coming from down the block or across the globe — to be inspired, empowered, and connect with each other to create a better future.”