A long-term South Side resident and cab driver, Akoma Amanze, lives across from the new Barack Obama Presidential Center and says the construction brought real hardship to his low-income housing complex. He supports Obama personally but describes repeated flooding, sleepless nights from heavy digging, and the loss of a neighborhood park that once mattered to his family. Management and project representatives, he says, offered no help, leaving residents to handle the fallout themselves. This piece hears his voice directly and reports the local consequences of a high-profile project placed in a working neighborhood.
Akoma Amanze has lived in the same South Side neighborhood for 18 years and now finds himself in the shadow of the Barack Obama Presidential Center. He drives a cab for a living and calls Jackson Park Terrace home, a low-income housing community directly across the street from the new 19.3 acre campus. The center’s opening brought crowds and spectacle, but for those who live next door the daily reality has been less glamorous.
He says the construction, which began in 2021, created a steady stream of headaches for people in his building. In his own words the process was “sometimes very, very disturbing.” That sums up a frustration many longtime residents feel when large projects move into established neighborhoods without clear accountability or consistent local support.
Amanze is careful to separate his personal feelings about Barack Obama from the hard problems he says the build caused at his home. “He’s my man, and I’m excited that this site is here” said Amanze, referring to Obama, “but as a resident, there has been a lot of things [that] have stopped us here.” That split — pride in a national figure and bitterness over local harm — is the heart of his complaint.
His clearest complaints are physical and direct: two floods in his apartment tied to the excavation work. “On two occasions, my apartment flooded while they were digging the lower level of that project,” he said. “Two times. And I had to deal with the ramifications of that twice. Those ramifications were that all my apartment was flooded, and I had to throw away everything on the floor. Boxes, papers, clothes, I had to throw them away.”
Beyond lost belongings, Amanze says the cleanup and recovery were entirely on him. He said he had to suck the water out of his home himself, and then clean the entire mess up himself. According to him, neither the complex’s management nor representatives from the center offered to help deal with the fallout, financially or otherwise, leaving tenants to absorb the cost.
The constant digging also brought vibrations that disrupted daily life and sleep for neighbors across the street. “Sometimes, you stay in bed or in the apartment, [and] the digging — sometimes when they were digging deep— [it] would be shaking your bed,” he said. “I had that experience all through the construction.” For working people and families, nights of shaking and noise can mean lost rest and frayed nerves.
What used to be an ordinary community park is now gone, and Amanze is blunt about what that meant to his family. He said he “more or less raised all [his] children” in that park, a plain statement about how public green space served as a practical lifeline for parents. The park carried daily routines and quiet comforts that construction displaced.
He remembers one small, human detail that highlights the loss: the swing his son favored when he was upset. “In fact, my last child, that is 14 today, there used to be a favorite swing on that park where I took him every time he starts crying or he starts showing signs of stress,” Amanze said. “I take him there, and I put him on that swing, and I swing him up and down, and then he will fall asleep, and then I bring him back home.” Those moments are the kind that do not make headlines but matter in a neighborhood’s daily life.
Still, Amanze says he has chosen to live with the changes rather than fight them nonstop. “When things are happening that you do not have the power to stop, you just have to learn to live with it,” he said. “I just learned to live with it. I’m not upset. I’m excited that my brother Obama was able to establish something this big in my neighborhood. At least in my mind, I’m a part of the history.”
