In the Shadow of the Obama Center, Chicago Residents Fight Displacement

This spring, nearly 80% of voters in two nearby precincts backed a non-binding referendum demanding the city pass a suite of far-reaching protections to help longtime residents stay in their homes, including reserving city-owned lots for deeply affordable housing. A similar ballot measure in a dozen other South Shore precincts won even wider support in 2023. The South Shore Housing Preservation Ordinance remains stalled in Chicago City Council, but the campaign to pass it is attracting longtime residents like Vanessa Clay, who’s lived in her South Shore condominium for 24 years. 

Lately, Clay says, the community has been changing around her. Nearby residents have reported rents being hiked by as much as 60%. During 2022, investors bought up nearly a third of for-sale homes in South Shore, the highest rate of investor purchases in the city. Clay and other South Shore residents fear that those investors are now waiting for the opportune time to sell at prices current neighbors cannot afford. 

“It seems like developers are coming in here and taking over,” Clay says. But she is determined to stay. 

To an outsider, the South Shore neighborhood may not appear to be an obvious candidate for gentrification. Three-quarters of the residents are renters, and the neighborhood population is 92% Black. A third of the population makes less than $25,000 per year and almost one in every six houses is vacant. What’s more, South Shore has often topped the list of neighborhoods with the city’s highest eviction rates, according to available data. But the history of Chicago and other urban centers shows that vacancies and evictions can set the stage for rapid gentrification.

“The city has a deep, long record of building itself up on the backs of poor Black and Latino folks, destroying their communities — either through ineptitude, lack of investment or intentional displacement,” says Dixon Romeo, executive director of Not Me We, a South Shore community organization organizing neighborhood tenants. ​“It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Not Me We was born in 2020, when Chicago Public Schools halted food deliveries to nearby Parkside Elementary during the uprising following George Floyd’s murder. When Romeo, a lifelong South Shore resident, learned that 70 children were relying on those meals, he worked with others to launch a mutual aid effort to distribute groceries. Soon after, they started helping their neighbors resist evictions. 

The mutual aid effort, now called Feed the Babies, continues. But tenant organizing is at the center of Not Me We’s work. ​“Mutual aid alone is not going to fix the problems people are dealing with,” says Romeo, 30. ​“Folks are coming to mutual aid because they can’t afford groceries. You ask why and they say their rent is $1,500 and went up $300 last year. Our focus has always been to organize because that is what is going to get us out of the situation we’re in.”

Gant, 26, grew up in an apartment with a view of Jackson Park. When she later saw photos of the park taken after hundreds of trees, some more than a century old, were torn up to clear space for the Obama Center, Gant began to fear for the community. She had her own experiences with the housing crisis: Her family was displaced three times due to apartments and houses being overrun with roaches, mold and, in one case, a fatal shooting in the building garage. Gant joined Not Me We and started working on the Obama community benefits agreement campaigns to protect the neighborhood. 

Gant’s local work was diverted when she began studies for a master’s degree in sustainable community development, which included coursework in Ecuador, South Africa and Malawi. ​“But the more I studied quote-unquote ​‘third world’ or developing countries,” she says, ​“the more I realized that there are places in the U.S. where the living conditions are the same — and one of those is my hometown!” 

Gant returned to Chicago and began working for Not Me We last year. ​“Housing is a human right, and we take that very seriously,” she says. ​“Everybody should have a place to lay their head.”

So the coalition’s current campaign centers on the South Shore Housing Preservation Ordinance, which aims to help both homeowners and tenants stay in the neighborhood — and to create some new protections that would apply citywide. The proposed measures include a new Office of the Tenant Advocate, a $15 million rental assistance fund, a right to return for tenants displaced by building code violations and a cap on application fees and security deposits. (Illinois law preempts rent control, but a statewide ​“Lift the Ban” campaign is challenging that, too.) 

The ordinance would also provide South Shore-specific funding for home repairs for longtime residents like Vanessa Clay, who has returned to work as a caregiver so she can afford the hefty maintenance costs for her building. And it would extend assistance and debt relief to eligible South Shore homeowners who struggle to keep up with property tax payments, while setting aside most city-owned South Shore vacant lots for the development of affordable housing. 

At a 2023 candidate forum hosted by Not Me We, Chicago City Council candidate Desmon Yancy promised to introduce the South Shore ordinance during his first 100 days in office. That promise helped Yancy win the seat, and he introduced the ordinance in September of 2023. But even after two rounds of referenda wins, its future is uncertain. Yancy told supporters in June that the ordinance needed more support if it was going to pass the City Council this year, as did Mayor Brandon Johnson. Meanwhile, local business and real-estate interests are pushing to strip tenant-friendly measures from the ordinance. 

Two other City Council members whose wards overlap South Shore, Michelle Harris and Greg Mitchell, have yet to back the proposal. They did not respond to a request for comment.

Not Me We is undeterred. ​“When we are going door to door talking with people, it is clear they want this ordinance,” Gant says. ​“People don’t want to leave the neighborhood, but they are seeing the shift in prices and different people coming in. There is a lot of frustration and fear.”

Anthony Edwards and Vanessa Clay, more than a generation older than Romeo and Gant, see the difference as well. ​“It has rekindled something in us to see young people joining with people from all ages in our community to stand up for ourselves,” says Edwards. ​“Nothing is going to be changed by just wishing it away.” 

Clay remembers being shocked when Not Me We canvassers came to her door, asking about what she and her neighbors were going through and inviting her to attend the next community event. ​“They are doing tremendous things,” she says. ​“Every time they have a meeting, it seems there are more and more people there — particularly seniors. That is good news, because we have a fight on our hands.” 

Back at the South Shore branch library, Romeo ends the teach-in by making the case for mobilizing more neighbors behind the ordinance. 

“I don’t care if you make zero dollars, I don’t care if you went to Harvard Law School,” he says. ​“You deserve to live wherever you want to live in the city of Chicago, and that needs to start in Black neighborhoods.”