Akoma Amanze has lived on Chicago's South Side for 18 years. He drives a cab, raises a 14-year-old kid, and until recently, had a community park near his apartment in Jackson Park Terrace where the neighborhood could breathe a little. That park is gone now. In its place sits a 19.3-acre campus dedicated to the legacy of Barack Obama.
Amanze's apartment flooded twice while they were digging the foundation.
"I had to throw away everything on the floor. Boxes, papers, clothes," Amanze told Fox News reporter Peter D'Abrosca. No compensation from building management. No compensation from the Obama Presidential Center. Just a guy in low-income housing watching his belongings get ruined so a former president could have a museum, library, and gardens bearing his name.
Construction on the Obama Presidential Center began in 2021. For years, residents of Jackson Park Terrace — a low-income housing complex sitting in the literal shadow of the project — endured what Amanze described as constant disruption. The digging shook his bed. "Sometimes when they were digging deep — it would be shaking your bed," he said. Not a metaphor. The man's apartment was physically vibrating because a billionaire ex-president needed a monument on the other side of the wall.
The center opened this past weekend to fanfare and media coverage that treated it as a triumphant homecoming for Obama's vision of community transformation. The 19.3-acre campus features a museum, library, gardens, and recreational facilities — all the things that sound wonderful in a press release and less wonderful when the construction destroys your possessions and eliminates the park your kids used to play in.
What makes Amanze's story worth paying attention to isn't the complaint. It's the resignation. "When things are happening that you do not have the power to stop, you just have to learn to live with it," he said. That's not a man who feels empowered by the community investment he was promised. That's a man who's given up pushing back against forces bigger than him.
And here's the part that sticks: Amanze still supports Obama. "He's my man, and I'm excited that this site is here," he told Fox News. A guy whose apartment flooded twice, whose neighborhood park was bulldozed, whose bed shook for years during construction — and he's still loyal. That's not gratitude. That's the particular kind of devotion that doesn't require results.
The Obama Presidential Center didn't offer Amanze a dime. Neither did his building management. The community that was supposed to be revitalized got a campus where tourists will take photos and a cab driver who lost his clothes in a flood nobody bothered to fix.
Obama built his career telling working people he was fighting for them. He told business owners "you didn't build that" — someone else made it happen. Now he's built a 19.3-acre tribute to himself on top of a community park in a low-income neighborhood, and when the construction flooded a resident's apartment, nobody so much as replaced the man's clothes.
Turns out he was right about one thing. Somebody else always pays the cost.
