Despite vociferous community opposition, the Philadelphia City Council on Thursday approved a $1.3 billion plan to build a downtown basketball arena next to Chinatown for their hometown 76ers that had been championed by Mayor Cherelle Parker.
The votes to ratify a package of bills authorizing the Sixers to proceed, mostly by a 12-5 margin, capped more than two years of wrangling over a 18,500-seat arena that supporters said would create thousands of construction jobs, particularly for Black and Hispanic residents, and help to revitalize the Center City neighborhood.
The vote also represented a signature win for Ms. Parker at the end of her first year in office, as well her allies in the building trades unions, who were among the project’s most vocal proponents. She is expected to sign the legislation before the end of the year.
“All of Philadelphia will benefit from this project,” Ms. Parker said at a City Hall news conference after the vote. “We are about to put the next generation of skilled workers to work right here.”
Then, acknowledging the drumbeat of criticism and protests — including on Thursday morning, just before the vote — she said: “We will ensure that Chinatown will not only survive, but that it will thrive. We will ensure that you are not harmed by this arena.”
But opponents, noting the long history of sports stadium deals around the country, said the project would devastate neighboring small businesses and landmarks in the city’s culturally and historically significant Chinatown. “An utter disgrace” is how a group called the No Arena Coalition described the council’s vote.
“These council members didn’t roll out the red carpet, they became the red carpet that billionaire developers walked all over,” the coalition said in a statement, referring to Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the Camden, N.J.-based company that owns the 76ers.
The coalition then noted previous failed attempts to build a baseball stadium and a casino in Chinatown.
“We have more in our playbook to kill this deal, and the fight continues in 2025,” the group said.
First proposed in July 2022, the 76 Place project would create more than 1,000 construction and operations jobs and generate about $700 million in tax revenue, according to the city’s own assessments. The project would require the partial demolition, which would begin in 2026, of a project that began as the Gallery mall, which was built in the 1970s but never delivered on the development’s promise to revitalize the surrounding Market East area.
Construction on the arena would begin in 2028, and would be finished in time for the 2031-32 N.B.A. season. That coincides the expiration of the Sixers’ lease at the Wells Fargo Center in south Philadelphia, which is part of a sports and entertainment complex where the Eagles, the N.F.L. team, and the Phillies, the M.L.B. team, also play.
The Sixers share the Wells Fargo Center with the N.H.L.’s Flyers, both of which are owned by Comcast.
The Sixers haven’t ruled out seeking state or federal money for the arena, though they note that they are not asking for city money. That represents a tactical shift from the team’s unsuccessful proposal in 2020 to build an arena on the waterfront with more than $800 million in state and city subsidies.
Still, a recent paper by the Tax Foundation, a think tank, noted that, time and again, “the promised tangible economic benefits — economic growth, income growth, wage growth, employment growth and higher tax revenues — do not occur the way that sports teams claim. Often, the only economic benefits occur near the stadium — and fall far short of expectations.”
During public hearings in the weeks leading up to Thursday’s vote, some council members had expressed reservations about some of the project’s details, including the effect on the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, the financially strapped regional rail system.
But in the end, the Sixers got almost everything that they wanted. The team has promised to fund a $60 million community benefits agreement that would be divided among the city, the school district, Chinatown, minority-owned businesses and others. That amount was more than their original offer of $50 million, but significantly less than the $300 million that community groups had calculated would be sufficient.
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