Podbit · The Indicator from Planet Money
The median sale price of a single-family home in Woodlawn has jumped 4.6 times in the past decade. Zillow now lists some homes in the neighborhood at $1 million. People have been displaced. The data is not ambiguous.
Where this was said
At 22:35 · chapter starts 20:30
When the Obama Center was first announced, the dominant fear among South Side residents was that it would serve as a Trojan horse for the University of Chicago to expand its land holdings into Woodlawn. Natalie Moore decided to test this claim empirically, drawing a boundary around East Woodlawn and mapping every significant landowner. [1] — Natalie Moore "City of Chicago largest landholder in East Woodlawn: A reporting project by Natalie Moore found the largest landholder in East Woodlawn was…" 21:07 The result was surprising: the biggest landholder wasn't the University of Chicago at all — it was the city of Chicago itself, which owned vast amounts of vacant land left over from demolished buildings. The late housing organizer Maddie Butler told Moore at the time that there was enough room for everyone in the community: so much vacancy existed that development could happen without displacing a single resident. Myra Kwadja adds that the tenant unions Butler worked with were consistent throughout their decade-long campaign — they were not anti-Obama Center. Their message was simply: 'We want to be able to stay here to enjoy it.' The students Kwadja worked with at Hyde Park Academy echoed the same sentiment: they hoped their younger siblings would get to use the new campus, because they feared their own families would be pushed out first.
Everyone feared the University of Chicago would use the Obama Center as cover for a land grab in Woodlawn. Natalie Moore's data reporting found the opposite: the city of Chicago was by far the biggest landholder in East Woodlawn, owning vacant lots from demolished homes. The city held the power to protect residents — and largely didn't use it.
A reporting project by Natalie Moore found the largest landholder in East Woodlawn was the city of Chicago — not the University of Chicago — due to vacant lots and inherited properties.
Housing organizers and tenant unions spent a decade campaigning with the message 'Yes, Obama Center, no displacement' — affirming the center while demanding housing protections.
Sam built Algrow, a SaaS for finding viral content formats, with zero coding experience using ChatGPT and Cursor. Six months later: 10,000 users, $14K/month in revenue.
Sam's first MVP threw an application error on its very first user — and he shipped it anyway. The core idea worked, and that was enough to validate the product and keep users coming back.
Sam joined Discord voice chats, muted himself, and silently screen-shared his product. Users in the chat started tagging him asking what the tool was. No pitch needed — curiosity did the selling.
Most founders post links in Discord and immediately get banned for self-promotion. Sam's approach was the opposite: build rapport, help people with the tool, let word of mouth do the work.
Find where your ICP lives. Listen before building. Validate with DMs and Loom recordings. Build in public with users inside your own Discord server. Turn early adopters into advocates with free access.
Instead of fearing the self-promo ban in large Discord servers, create your own private server for your product. You funnel in ideal customers and build a relationship that email can't replicate.
Algrow helps creators find and replicate viral video formats, starting at $25/month. It analyzes subscriber counts, average views, and trending formats — and can even generate the videos with AI.
After weeks of Sam silently screen-sharing in a Discord server, the server owner — unprompted — made a full YouTube promotional video about Algrow. Sam paid nothing and asked for nothing.
Producer Gus admits Discord never crossed his mind as a customer acquisition channel. Pat connects the insight to a broader lesson: match your distribution channel to where your actual customers live.
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