CHICAGO (AP) — When President-elect Barack Obama heads home for a break from the White House, he won't go to a sprawling ranch or private seaside compound. Obama will come back to a crowded city neighbourhood, creating different security challenges for the Secret Service and perhaps headaches for his neighbours.

No other recent first family has lived in a city neighbourhood like the Obamas. The $1.6 million mansion he and his wife, Michelle, share with their two young daughters sits just off a busy street — a stretch of which has been closed to traffic — and his closest neighbours are just a few feet away.

"My Kennebunkport is on the South Side of Chicago," Obama said in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune. "Our friends are here. Our family is here. We are going to try to come back here as often as possible ... at least once every six weeks or couple of months."

His busy South Side neighbourhood affords none of the privacy of President George W. Bush's 1,600-acre Crawford, Texas, spread or Ronald Reagan's White House in the West was his mountaintop Rancho del Cielo in California.

But Obama is a Chicago transplant whose campaign was rooted in the notion that he's not like the other guys, and living in an urban neighbourhood near the University of Chicago is a symbol of that, said Paul Light, a presidential historian at New York University.

Maintaining strong ties to Chicago is one way Obama can stay in touch with the people who helped him get elected, Light said. "I don't think the public will take kindly toward any sort of signal that he is somehow losing touch with the outside world, that he's trapped on island Washington," Light said.

Like other presidents, Obama is sure to spend some of his down time at Camp David, the presidential retreat on a remote Maryland mountaintop, and in Hawaii, a regular vacation spot for him and where he spent much of his childhood.

For security reasons, the Obamas' urban oasis already has changed. Their large red brick house doesn't have the benefit of being surrounded by acres (hectares) of land like other presidential retreats, so the city streets near it look like a military zone with blocks-long metal and concrete barriers. Secret Service agents and police patrol the area.

But the Obamas are hardly prisoners in their home, although the family is under the constant protection of the Secret Service. The tight security near Obama's home is something KAM Isaiah Israel, a landmark Chicago temple across the street, is taking in stride.

"We have lived with and will continue to live with the security, and people have gotten used to it," said congregation president Lawrence Bloom. He said the temple continues to run a full schedule of religious services, classes and programs.

When temple officials have met with the Secret Service, agents have told them that Obama is concerned about the imposition on the neighbourhood because of his tight security, Bloom said.