Akoma Amanze has lived at Jackson Park Terrace on Chicago's South Side for eighteen years. He drives a cab for a living. He raised his children in a low-income housing complex that sits directly across the street from what is now the Barack Obama Presidential Center, a 19.3-acre campus of museums, gardens, and gathering spaces dedicated to the 44th president. Over the opening weekend, as thousands of visitors and celebrities streamed through the new facility, Amanze told a different story about what the project left behind.
His apartment flooded twice during construction. Vibrations from deep digging shook his bed for months. A neighborhood park where he once soothed his youngest child on a swing set no longer exists. And neither the complex's management nor representatives from the Obama Center, he says, offered him a dime of help.
The account, reported by Fox News Digital, puts a human face on a question that rarely gets asked when grand civic projects open to applause: what happened to the people who had to live through the construction?
Construction on the Obama Presidential Center began in 2021. The project consumed a large portion of Jackson Park, replacing green space that had served the surrounding neighborhood for years. Amanze described the flooding as occurring while workers dug the lower level of the complex, a phase that apparently redirected or disturbed water in ways that reached his apartment across the street.
Fox News Digital quoted Amanze describing the damage:
"On two occasions, my apartment flooded while they were digging the lower level of that project. 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."
He cleaned up both times himself. No one from Jackson Park Terrace management stepped in. No one from the Obama Center reached out. The belongings he lost, papers, clothing, personal items, were simply gone.
The flooding was not the only problem. Amanze told Fox News Digital that the deep excavation work sent vibrations through the housing complex strong enough to rattle his bed.
"Sometimes, you stay in bed or in the apartment, [and] the digging, sometimes when they were digging deep, [it] would be shaking your bed. I had that experience all through the construction."
That phrase, "all through the construction", covers roughly five years. From 2021 through the center's opening weekend in June 2026, Amanze and his neighbors lived with the noise, the shaking, and the consequences.
Before the presidential center rose across the street, a community park occupied part of the land. For Amanze, that park was not an abstraction. It was where he took his youngest child, now fourteen, when the boy was fussy or stressed as an infant.
"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. 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."
That swing, that park, that quiet corner of the neighborhood, all of it is gone. In its place stands a sprawling campus featuring a museum, library, gardens, and recreational activities spread across 19.3 acres. The center has drawn national attention, with supporters celebrating Obama's legacy and critics raising pointed questions about what the facility actually delivers to the community it displaced.
What stands out in Amanze's account is not just the physical damage but the institutional silence that followed. He told Fox News Digital that neither his housing complex's management nor Obama Center representatives offered financial assistance or any other form of support after his apartment flooded, twice.
The article does not include any response from Jackson Park Terrace management or the Obama Foundation to Amanze's claims. Whether anyone filed formal complaints, whether engineers assessed whether the flooding was causally linked to the excavation, whether other residents experienced similar problems, none of that is addressed in the reporting.
That gap matters. When a massive construction project rises next to a low-income housing complex and a resident says his apartment flooded because of the digging, the burden should fall on the project's backers and the property's managers to explain what happened and what they did about it. Silence from both sides is not a good look.
The Obama Presidential Center itself has faced scrutiny on multiple fronts. Reports have surfaced about cost overruns and unpaid contractors during the building process, a pattern that raises its own questions about how the project was managed and who bore the costs.
Perhaps the most striking element of Amanze's interview is his tone. Despite the flooding, the lost belongings, the shaking bed, and the vanished park, he refused to express bitterness. He told Fox News Digital he supports Obama and is glad the center exists in his neighborhood.
"He's my man, and I'm excited that this site is here, but as a resident, there has been a lot of things [that] have stopped us here."
He went further, framing his experience as something he simply had to endure:
"When things are happening that you do not have the power to stop, you just have to learn to live with it. 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.]"
Amanze's generosity of spirit is admirable. But his graciousness should not let the responsible parties off the hook. A man living in low-income housing had his apartment flooded twice, lost personal belongings, endured years of physical disruption, and watched a park his family used disappear, and no one in a position of authority apparently lifted a finger to help him.
Meanwhile, the dedication weekend featured speeches and celebrations. Obama himself used the occasion to offer political commentary, and the event drew national media coverage. Critics have also questioned whether the facility functions more as a foundation headquarters than a traditional presidential library, a debate that continues to simmer even as the doors open.
The pattern here is familiar to anyone who has watched large-scale development land in working-class neighborhoods. The project gets announced with fanfare. Political leaders take credit. Construction disrupts daily life for years. And the people who absorb the noise, the dust, the flooding, and the lost green space are the ones with the least power to push back.
Amanze is a cab driver. He lives in a low-income complex. He does not have a team of lawyers or a public relations operation. He has a flooded apartment and a memory of a swing set that no longer exists.
The Obama Presidential Center may well become a valued institution on Chicago's South Side. Its 19.3 acres of museums, gardens, and public spaces could serve the community for decades. But the people who lived through the five-year construction process, the ones whose beds shook and whose floors flooded, deserved better than silence from the organizations responsible.
Grand legacies look different depending on which side of the street you're standing on.
