Latisha Bolden, exhausted from her eight hour shift at a nearby hospital in early March, came home to devastating news.  Her son handed her a notice from their landlord stating they’d have to move out of their Woodlawn apartment by the end of July. The building’s new owners are renovating. 

“I didn’t see this coming at all,” she said. Looking around for other apartments, she was again surprised that units similar to her one-bedroom now cost about $1,800 a month. Today, her monthly rent is $1,200.  

Days later, 31-year-old Kyana Butler, who also lives in Woodlawn,  and about 20 others chanted “Hell, no! We ain’t gonna go!” at a news conference after learning the building owner was listing their apartment building for sale. They’d be forced out into what they call an unaffordable housing market.  

Butler has lived in the Chaney Braggs building since she was about 3 and has known many of her neighbors for decades. They attend church nearby and their kids play together at the park across the street. Butler wanted the same for her young daughter. 

“I want to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to be forced out.”

The city of Chicago was supposed to have created a safety net for residents like Bolden and Butler, as they faced the threat of being priced out of their neighborhood with the opening of the nearby Obama Presidential Center in June, and all the real estate speculation that followed it.  Adopted in 2020, the city’s anti-displacement ordinance for Woodlawn was designed to protect long-term tenants from surprise sales and increased affordable housing options in the neighborhood.

But a review of hundreds of pages of city records and dozens of interviews with residents, organizers and experts by the Illinois Answer Project shows that the city’s promises often fell short of reality as it failed to spend enough money to run some programs, provided little supervision and abandoned others. 

Three of the seven programs in the ordinance failed to get off the ground. Others were very limited in scope: 

• Dozens of property owners have sold multifamily buildings in Woodlawn since a pilot program requiring them to give tenants the first chance at buying them began in 2020. Housing department records show that not one landlord has filed the required notice of these sales to tenants or to the city. 
• The city was supposed to set aside 52 lots for affordable housing development. Only one project, a 58-unit apartment building, has been completed in five years. 
• A loan program for local developers got off to a slow start. It funded fewer completed housing units in five years than it had hoped to in the first year of the program. In 2026, the program is producing additional results, with 18 units getting rehabbed or receiving improvements for new or current renters. 
• $2 million dedicated to two programs to preserve or rehab affordable units went unspent. 
• A jobs program designed to employ local residents resulted in only three hires from the neighborhood.
• 36 long-term homeowners each received grants of around $20,000 to complete crucial home repairs. 

Chicago Department of Housing Commissioner Lissette Castañeda declined a request for an interview through a spokesman. In a statement, the department defended its work, calling the ordinance a success for preventing displacement and a model for future efforts to combat gentrification. However, it acknowledged some programs needed more money to succeed. 

“Programs with limited activity still provided critical insight, as they identified areas where deeper subsidy or alternative financing structures are needed,” department spokesperson Michael Cox said in January in an email. 

Cox later added that last month, the city formed a working group of city officials and residents to improve implementation of the Woodlawn ordinance. City officials have said they have learned from these programs as they implement another anti-displacement ordinance, passed last year, which covers South Shore and sections of East Woodlawn. 

Housing data shows that it has gotten more expensive to live in Woodlawn. DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies shows that prices on single and multi-family homes on the east side of the neighborhood, closer to the Obama Center, have doubled since 2019. And in 2024, less than a third of housing stock in the area was considered affordable, half of what was available 15 years ago.  

Organizers and political leaders, including Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th,) say they’ve seen many residents forced out of their homes. 

Taylor, a critic of the ordinance, said the policy was weakened as part of a political compromise during a highly-contentious time, dooming it from the start.

“What you have is a watered-down version of what the community knew would protect us,” she said. “So it failed.” 

The problem, she said, was that there was no continuous stream of funding, so resources ran out quickly. 

A former housing department employee, familiar with the programs, said that wasn’t the only issue. 

The ex-employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity since they still do contract work for the city, flagged numerous administrative issues that plagued the execution of the ordinance.  For example, records show, one of the ordinance’s key programs, the Tenant Right of First Refusal pilot, didn’t have a staff person dedicated to oversee it. 

Dixon Romeo, an organizer and executive director of Southside Together, who fought for housing protections in Woodlawn, said the ordinance is a step in the right direction but not enough to protect many of the families displaced by rising costs. 

“The city did not do the work … to implement it well,” he said. Romeo and his community organizing group have fought for housing protections in the neighborhood since the Obama Center was announced in 2015. 

“From 2015 until 2026 …we’ve seen a lot of people get evicted. We’ve seen a lot of people get displaced,” he said. 

For many, Woodlawn is unaffordable

Four near identical, newly built and boxy townhomes, each selling for nearly $1 million, stand out against the brick multifamily units that have housed generations of Woodlawn residents. The shipyard style-homes on South Ellis Avenue are just a few of the many signs of the fast-changing neighborhood, particularly in East Woodlawn where single-family home prices have doubled to a median cost of $440,000 from 2019 to 2025, according to the Institute for Housing Study’s data. 

The bigger problem, said April Jackson, an associate professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, is developers who are looking for big payouts and are tearing down much-needed multifamily homes to make way for the “McMansions.” 

That hasn’t gone unnoticed by longtime residents like Marcus Gill, who noted those houses as evidence that fears of many residents have turned true — that they are being priced out of their community thanks to the real estate speculation spurred by the construction of the Obama Center. 

“It’s a huge catalyst,” Gill said, standing outside his childhood home. 

Residents and developers have debated for the past decade whether the Obama Center would cause displacement. Those who believe it does point to apartment and home listings that boast proximity to the center as an attraction for prospective renters and homeowners. 

The Obama Foundation described hopes that the center would cause an economic boom in the neighborhood. The foundation is hosting monthly “community tourism preparation” sessions for local property owners interested in renting Airbnbs and for business owners wanting to capitalize on increased tourists.  

In a statement, the foundation told Illinois Answers it supports the city’s work to protect affordable housing through the Woodlawn ordinance and another ordinance covering East Woodlawn and South Shore, passed in September.  “While more work remains, we are proud to see the tide turning on the historic disinvestment of the South Side,” the statement said. 

Residents have also noticed that the number of neighbors, who aren’t Black, moving into the area has increased in that same time period.

While the entire area has been losing Black residents in recent years, East Woodlawn in particular has seen an increase in its white population that far outpaces the city as a whole, according to an Illinois Answers Project analysis of Census Bureau data. 

New construction and renovation projects are a common sight in East Woodlawn. Signs for development companies, rental ads and building permits are scattered across the area.

One home, built in 2019 on a lot that used to be owned by the city, is currently listed for more than a million dollars. The price tag shows the challenge of keeping affordable homes in an area with a rising cost of living.

The city’s inventory of available land is one of the ways officials try to incentivize developers to build affordable housing. The Woodlawn ordinance required the city to reserve 52 of those city-owned, vacant lots for homes affordable for the most cost-burdened residents. 

Since 2020, only one development project has come to fruition. Park Station Lofts is a 58-unit building with 41 affordable apartments for the typical Woodlawn household making about $35,000 or less. That project led to three local hires, according to the city.

The city tried to encourage development on its lots by sending  out requests for proposals from developers. It announced funding for its first deal in April: A $48 million dollar project that would put 60 affordable apartments on the market.

The slow development on city-owned lots isn’t much compared to what’s needed in Woodlawn, where affordable housing stock has been dropping. 

Twanda Barlow lives in the same three-story building as Bolden, where a new owner is planning a rehab that will force her to move. 

She doesn’t want to stay in Woodlawn, she said. Even as rents have gone up, the neighborhood hasn’t gotten much better, she said. Barlow said there’s been no significant improvement to public spaces, local businesses or even dilapidated vacant lots.  “It’s not worth it at all.” 

No right of first refusal

The city’s pilot program for tenants to give them the right of first refusal was supposed to provide renters like Barlow and her neighbor Bolden the same stability as homeowners and protect them against the capriciousness of landlords.

The program was designed to ease tenants’ path to homeownership by giving them several months to organize and secure a bank loan if they wanted to buy their apartment building themselves. 

Since moving into her one-bedroom in 2021, Bolden has seen the building change hands twice.  

Close to a year after she signed the lease, a now-dissolved limited liability corporation sold the building to a local investor named Mike McCauley. Without notice, Bolden had a new landlord who raised her rent by $100 per month, she said. McCauley could not be reached for comment. 

Then, last June, after facing public criticism from his tenants for leaving them without gas for a week, McCauley sold the building to a family-owned company, Maple & Oak, which is buying, gutting and rehabbing historic-looking multifamily homes throughout the west side of Woodlawn. 

Real estate investor Perry Pappas, speaking for the company, told Illinois Answers he didn’t buy the building with the intention of renovating and raising rents but was surprised by a city inspection that required repairs. His tenants contend Pappas has been slow to address maintenance issues since taking over. When asked if he plans to keep the same rent price after repairs he said, “we will do what the market calls for.” 

The tenants of the building, again, had no idea about the deal until after it was done. But the law says, both times, they should have. 

According to the Department of Housing, neither the managers of the suburban LLC nor McCauley sent notices of the sale to the city or to the tenants as mandated by the pilot program. Bolden and her neighbors never had the chance to try to buy their building.. 

Neither has any tenant in the area. 

The Department of Housing has no record of any landlord in five years filing a notice warning the city or their residents that they were selling the building. And the city didn’t do anything about it. The law allows the city to fine landlords who violate it up to $1,000 a day. DOH had no records of enforcing any penalties.

A spokesperson for DOH said they have revised the program in its second-iteration anti-displacement in Jackson Park and Woodlawn to allow for online submissions, clarified instructions and made rules available in multiple languages. 

“We believe this will increase compliance in the Jackson Park area,” Cox, the DOH spokesman, wrote in an email.

Local residents and experts alike say the program suffered not only from poor oversight but also lack of financial support for low-income residents who can’t afford significant down payments. 

Barlow’s building sold for more than a million dollars. She said raising that money among the other tenants was a near impossibility. “Who has that just sitting around,” she said, adding that if they had financial help from the state or other organizations, “then that would be a whole different story.”

Other cities have tried this model. Right of first refusal programs in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco have seen more success than those in Chicago because well-funded organizations front down payments for tenants. 

Christian Diaz, a housing advocate who helped write a similar ordinance for Chicago’s Northwest Side, said right of first refusal programs will continue to struggle without funding. “The city has to step in and provide real subsidies,” he said. 

The city did step up with money, though, in another program, one of the few that residents have praised as making a real difference.

One program that worked 

A $20,000 grant from the preservation ordinance helped Jerrold Sims fix a major leak at his Woodlawn duplex. 

“It helped me stay in my home,” he said. 

The million dollar home repair program offered direct aid to homeowners facing increasing property taxes and maintenance costs that could drive them out of their homes.

Gill, who also received the home repair grant, saw his tax bill increase by nearly 60% to more than $3,300 from 2014 to 2024. The grant helped him fix a backyard fence at his childhood home. 

Gill, a local business owner, was a part of the group that drafted an early and more ambitious iteration of the Woodlawn Housing Preservation Ordinance; they wanted property tax freezes for everyone, but that never happened. 

As for Sims, if it weren’t for a tax freeze for senior citizens and other exemptions, his tax bill would have more than tripled. And as property taxes increase, so do the calls from investors interested in buying his home, Sims said.

These investors, he said, make low-ball offers. That’s a common practice for real estate investors looking to buy out people who can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood where the cost of living has increased. 

“I have all these people that call me. They call all of us, wanting to buy our homes … ever since the Obama Center is almost completed,” he said. 

That makes direct aid to ease the cost of living critical for many residents. 

Taylor said that she wanted to see this type of direct aid continue every year as cost pressures on residents increase in Woodlawn. 

“Saving maybe 100 families is not what people signed up for,” Taylor said. “It’s not why I got into office.” 

The challenge of building affordable housing

The problem, experts say, is the costs of building affordable homes, which researchers reported last year have exceeded $700,000 to build just one apartment unit that is affordable by city standards. 

Jackson told Illinois Answers that rising construction costs combined with declining public subsidies make it “incredibly difficult” to build affordable housing in the city. She said Woodlawn ordinance programs to build or rehabilitate this type of housing in the neighborhood were not immune to the high costs. 

And critics of the city’s housing affordability requirements say the deals it lays out for developers often don’t make financial sense.

One example is the Woodlawn Loan Fund. The city gave about $300,000  to a non-profit mortgage lender, Community Investment Corporation (CIC), to supplement financing for low-interest construction loans to local developers who could rehab vacant residences and set aside at least half of the units in their  multi-family projects as affordable. The program initially required $1.5 million in funding from the city.  

Records from DOH and CIC show that only half of the program’s  projects  under consideration were completed. One CIC document shows that program administrators set the goal of approving 45 units in the first year. By the end of 2025, only 40 became available for renters. 

The program also set goals for single-family homes. None of those projects has been completed. 

A spokesperson for CIC told reporters in an email that funding from the city ended at the end of 2025, but the loan program is still taking applications. 

Rising costs also doomed a number of other programs in the ordinance. Preservation of Affordable Housing, a nonprofit housing developer, said the $500,000 it received from the city to buy and renovate apartments wasn’t enough to execute a project. And money for another program for landlords to refinance to keep rents low also went unused.

The city sets strict guidelines on how much landlords who take public money can charge for rent. But even in playing by those city rules, many developers set rents as high as they’re allowed. 

Even developers who are working under the city’s affordability rules are looking to charge about $2,000 for a two-bedroom.

Craig Yarbrough, a developer building a multifamily home in West Woodlawn with help from the Woodlawn Loan Fund, said he considers that price affordable. 

But that’s far too expensive for some residents, including the local alderman, Taylor who said her five-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment rent increased from $1,000 to $1,500 in the last five years. When it hits $2,000, she plans to move. 

Taylor told Illinois Answers she’s gotten hundreds of calls from residents priced out of Woodlawn. 

“Had the city of Chicago listened to the community, this would not have happened.”