"It’s the ultimate in irony: The world’s most famous ex-community organizer is facing a minor uprising from the community where his presidential center is supposed to be built—the same community, in fact, where he got his start in politics."
...
"Measured as always, Obama began by telling Taylor, “I was a community organizer.” Then he said, “I know the neighborhood. I know that the minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ … next thing I know, I’ve got 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork.”
The answer infuriated Taylor, who pays $1,000 a month for the Woodlawn apartment she shares with her mother and two children, and is worried that the Obama Center’s cachet will drive up neighborhood rents. Months later, she is still furious at the former president.
'He got a lot of nerve saying that,” Taylor told me. “He forgotten who he is. He forgot the community got him where he is.' ”
...
"It’s an ongoing battle that activists have taken all the way to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, and that may have implications for next year’s aldermanic elections.
Obama now finds himself on the receiving end of the same demands his younger self once made to crusty Chicago politicians he derided as “ward heelers.” But, as the dispute plays out, Obama the former president is far more powerful than the City Hall bureaucrats and state senators he once badgered for resources—maybe too powerful for organizers to rally against."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/28/barack-obama-library-chicago-217093
...
"Measured as always, Obama began by telling Taylor, “I was a community organizer.” Then he said, “I know the neighborhood. I know that the minute you start saying, ‘Well, we’re thinking about signing something that will determine who’s getting jobs and contracts and this and that’ … next thing I know, I’ve got 20 organizations coming out of the woodwork.”
The answer infuriated Taylor, who pays $1,000 a month for the Woodlawn apartment she shares with her mother and two children, and is worried that the Obama Center’s cachet will drive up neighborhood rents. Months later, she is still furious at the former president.
'He got a lot of nerve saying that,” Taylor told me. “He forgotten who he is. He forgot the community got him where he is.' ”
...
"It’s an ongoing battle that activists have taken all the way to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office, and that may have implications for next year’s aldermanic elections.
Obama now finds himself on the receiving end of the same demands his younger self once made to crusty Chicago politicians he derided as “ward heelers.” But, as the dispute plays out, Obama the former president is far more powerful than the City Hall bureaucrats and state senators he once badgered for resources—maybe too powerful for organizers to rally against."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/28/barack-obama-library-chicago-217093