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There are many alternatives for a presidential library. One idea might have been to build on the parcel outside Washington Park and adopt the recently shuttered Dyett High School building, which is tucked inside park borders just around the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and 51st Street. That building combines two Chicago institutions: It was designed by David Haid, a protégé of Mies van der Rohe, and it was depicted in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Moreover, Southeast Side residents badly needed the city to do something with the building: In the fall, a community group organized a 34-day hunger strike protesting the closure of the school. (In this case, the city relented and agreed to reopen the school.)

That’s just one example. Another solution would be for the Barack Obama Foundation to simply buy a parcel and develop it honestly. There are nearly 80 acres of vacant city-owned land in the Washington Park area and more than 60 acres of vacant land in Woodlawn. Why not improve upon some of them?

It should worry Chicagoans that the mayor, operating without any checks, is able to horse-trade with the valuable cultural resources of poorer neighborhoods. It sets a bad precedent for these specific parks, and it sets a bad precedent for presidential libraries to come. The specific goal in luring a presidential library to the South Side is to create new valuable cultural resources, not cut costs for the Obamas. And the goal in building a presidential library is to honor those values for which the president stands, not indulge in greedy politics.

It’s ironic that the Barack Obama Foundation is responsible for denying the South Side the opportunity to organize to discuss the best options for the Washington Park and Jackson Park communities. When it’s completed, the Barack Obama Presidential Center is bound to gorgeous, but it has already failed the community it is supposed to serve.

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