
Jose F. Moreno/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP
Supporters and Philadelphia Chinatown community leaders gather to demonstrate against a new downtown sports arena, September 18, 2024, outside Philadelphia City Hall.
Last Sunday, Wei Chen began to get messages that the Philadelphia 76ers had ditched their downtown basketball arena plan for another site in the existing Sports Complex in the southern end of the city. He thought that the texts were rumors or, worse, a setup. Between phones calls and searches, however, he found out that the news wasn’t a hoax. The Sixers weren’t coming. Chinatown had been spared.
“It felt like winning a big lottery,” says Chen, the civic engagement director of Asian Americans United.
Philadelphia has long viewed its Chinatown as disposable. Years ago, a six-lane highway and the convention center had hemmed in what was left of the neighborhood. Proposals for a prison, a baseball stadium, and two casinos had been fought off. The latest incursion, a plan for a new arena to replace a much-criticized aging mall near small stores and homes, had the support of the mayor, most city councilmembers, construction unions, and rabid sports fans.
The city council approved the plan in December despite a Chinatown-led “resistance,” as Chen called it, that had attracted the support of thousands of outraged residents from across Philly. Shaken Chinatown residents found themselves on the cusp of the Lunar New Year still at risk of seeing the slow erasure of a historic enclave by a billionaire-backed vanity project.
Then, that plan evaporated almost as suddenly as it had appeared. The major stunner in the two years of drama—debates, demonstrations, and hearings—was that only two weeks ago the NBA and NFL commissioners convinced the Sixers owners, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment moguls Josh Harris, David Blitzer, and David Adelman, to make nice and end their feud with their landlord, Comcast Spectacor, another sports and entertainment conglomerate that owns the Wells Fargo Center where the team plays. Comcast also owns the Flyers, the city’s professional hockey team. They play in the same building and competed for its event calendar, a long-running sore point.
For a major city to have two competing arenas within a few miles of each other, each with their own event lineups, was a competitive arrangement bound to cut into someone’s bottom line. Comcast also owns NBCUniversal and closed an 11-year deal with the NBA last July. These scenarios didn’t make sense to the two leagues’ movers and shakers, and neither did a threatened move from one of the country’s ten largest cities to an even grittier Camden, New Jersey, just across the Delaware River.
Comcast and the Sixers owners now co-own the downtown site and have pledged to pursue other development projects to replace the mall. The media conglomerate also will get a minority share in a Sixer bid to obtain a WNBA team.
Philadelphia had been taken in by a corporate-led revitalization process that promised a “dream” that only politicos could love.
Like many cities across the country, Philadelphia had been taken in by a corporate-led revitalization process that promised a “dream” that only politicos could love: revitalizing a major downtown corridor in desperate need of post-pandemic reinvestment by giving up tax revenues the new facilities would otherwise produce. Mayors and fans get bragging rights, but that’s about the extent of the benefits from arena and stadium projects designed to ramp up owner profits and cut outlays to municipalities.
For its part, Chinatown has scored an impressive win. But Philadelphia’s initial (and prolonged) willingness to accept such a poor deal rather than responding to residents’ concerns about siphoning off taxpayer dollars is a persistent concern for all cities susceptible to the illusion that billion-dollar investments are by definition something that city leaders can’t afford to ignore.
“If you don’t see Chinatown, first, as a cultural gem, as something to be preserved and not something just to be shoved aside for some larger, bigger, shiner project or trophy, that’s a concern,” says Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke of the Working Families Party. “It’s a problem in our politics.”
In office only one year, Mayor Cherelle Parker put on her game face and called the Sixers/Comcast change-of-venue deal a “win-win-win-win.” Scour social media, though, and you’ll find that many residents thought the mayor and 12 of her city council colleagues been played. At least in the short term, Parker is the main fall guy in an elaborate bluff—if that’s what it was, as some believe—to get the Sixers to agree to some menu of concessions. Parker and her colleagues plunged into an absurd show of civic surrender—at least, of needed tax revenues—that eventually concluded back where everyone had started: in South Philly, at the Sports Complex where the MLB Phillies and NFL Eagles also play.
City leaders had held hearings and secured studies (paid for by the team) that indicated that they weren’t just going to give up valuable property without getting sizable benefits. The team proved very adept at playing off different groups of the city against one another, particularly when it came to trying and ultimately failing to dial up racial tensions between Asian and Black neighborhoods.
In response, a multiracial, cross-city grassroots opposition movement germinated, uniting high school and college students, residents in other neighborhoods who’d periodically tried to block big real estate projects, and suburbanites who liked the South Philly site just where it was and didn’t want to deal with downtown traffic, parking lots, public transportation, or, as they whispered in not-so-hushed tones, crime.
But despite the patina of progress with which the pols invested it, the entire negotiation process, which ignored downtown residents, suffered from the public perception that it was rigged to achieve a preordained outcome with underwhelming benefits. Owners of sports enterprises frequently earn multiple billions, and cities dance to their redevelopment tunes and forfeit tax revenues for education, public safety, and sometimes even transportation infrastructure to support these new developments. HBSE dangled private capital investment to build the arena and then nickel-and-dimed the city to accept a paltry community benefits agreement. The company would also have given the land to the city and would have been exempt from property taxes.
“We have wasted so much time and resources prioritizing a pet project of billionaires,” says O’Rourke. “All the legislative air for the city in the fall was sucked up focusing on an arena that ultimately got turned around within two weeks without any public consideration.” The council’s legislative work, he says, could have been better focused on more pressing issues related to the incoming Trump administration, such as Philadelphia’s sanctuary-city status.

Matt Rourke/AP Photo
Philadelphia 76ers co-owner Josh Harris, right, speaks during a news conference in Philadelphia, January 13, 2025, announcing that the 76ers will partner with Comcast, their current landlord, to build a new arena in South Philadelphia.
Chen went further: The deciders who supported the downtown arena are part of the city’s “corruption culture,” he says. “These people have to go.”
There was strong public sentiment that when the ownership team showed up with a downtown plan, they should have been convinced to stay in South Philadelphia. But the fear of a Jersey move loomed large. Nevertheless, the next city election is not until 2027, and Philly’s first woman mayor has time to redeem herself. Much will depend on how she handles the next downtown plan and the new arena to replace the Wells Fargo Center.
The arena plan never made much sense in Philadelphia’s compact downtown core. It would have situated a massive sports facility next to the city’s mammoth convention center and near a major hospital. The Sixers often asserted that they would seek state and federal dollars for the facility, in part because it would have been built above the existing Jefferson Station. Why city officials somehow thought new funding would be forthcoming from Washington or Harrisburg is a mystery known only to them, given the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s chronic fiscal distress.
That SEPTA would get federal approval and dollars for the engineering upgrades necessary to construct an arena over rail also glossed over the fact that the Trump administration would probably oppose such a request. Even a Harris administration would not have been a slam dunk given the state’s position: Several days before the announcement of the new agreement, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) reminded the team owners that Pennsylvania would not be providing any dollars to beef up the rail station or SEPTA service for games.
“If you have enough money, you can find a solution,” admits Eli Storch, chair of the Design Advocacy Group, a citywide coalition that works on design quality and equity in planning, architecture, and preservation. The Sixers did not seek DAG’s input until the group announced its opposition to the project. “Our major sticking point was that it wasn’t the right project for that site,” says Storch. They felt an arena would, like the neighboring convention center, be vacant most of the time. The building would have been just plopped down on the site, instead of serving as a well-integrated community entertainment and third space that would please fans, neighbors, and metro-area residents.
But Philadelphia’s downtown redevelopment quandary has turned into a whack-a-mole situation, further complicated by the closure of a Macy’s department store, a tenant in a historical-landmark building near City Hall. Storch described the closure as a punch in the gut, but one the city should have seen coming, given the company’s financial issues. The building houses beloved institutions: the largest fully functioning pipe organ on the planet, a popular Christmas light show, and a huge bronze eagle the size of a bison, which is a well-known meeting spot. Filling that space with retail or residences or a combination of the two might prove to be easier than coming up with a replacement for the downtown mall.
What’s clear from all this Sturm und Drang is that the city needs a more comprehensive master plan to span a central corridor that runs from the historic “Old City” (the site of Independence Hall and museums) through Chinatown and then north to City Hall, rather than the common practice of building projects site by site. Philadelphia will require fresh, serious, and sustained consultations with community members, especially since developers can get larger projects approved with minimal design review rather than the more thoughtful and participatory mandatory processes that exist in some comparably sized cities. What might replace the mall/arena? Last year, the Save Chinatown Coalition hosted a planning workshop that zeroed in on a number of ideas for the mall site, including affordable housing, schools, and small local retail spaces, a new library, and a park and gardens.
Meanwhile, in South Philadelphia, the four professional teams have an opportunity to collaborate rather than dictate, and help design one of country’s unique sports-centric areas. City leaders have the chance to redeem themselves after two years of subpar bureaucratic processes that engendered relentless drama and, finally, no new development.
“It’s rare that you get to develop a new neighborhood in a city as dense as Philadelphia from scratch,” says Storch. But City Hall must also insist on the kind of serious master-planning work that can produce an urban “showpiece,” especially in conjunction with the new live-work-play development under way nearby in the former Navy Yard. “Now that the council and the mayor have been granted a reprieve on Market East,” says Storch, “they can say, ‘Wow, that really got out of hand; what is the right process?’”