Mayor Cherelle Parker worked to shore up support for the proposed $1.3 billion Sixers arena in her home base Monday night, visiting a church in Mount Airy. It was the second town hall Parker held on the issue, following a heated, protest-laden one in the city’s Convention Center back in September.
The three-hour event Monday at Mt. Airy Church of God in Christ drew at least 100 attendees — many of them likely constituents of Cindy Bass, one of the more arena-critical voices in City Council whose district includes the church. Bass herself was in the audience, as was neighboring Councilmember Anthony Phillips.
Parker emphasized to the crowd that she wanted them to hear about the project directly from her and not “through a filter.” The Mayor, a Mount Airy native herself, appealed to shared experiences among the older, middle class, Black residents of Northwest Philly who filled the room, threading together the potential economic benefits of the arena with childhood memories of a more bustling Market Street and the history of Mount Airy’s own economic ups and downs.
The bid to stir support comes as the arena continues to face fierce, organized opposition from Chinatown residents as well as community groups nearby and throughout the city. The majority of Philadelphians speaking out in Council’s public comment sessions have been arena opponents.
Boon or bust?
Parker’s administration, along with the powerful Philadelphia Building Trades Council and the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, argue that the arena would be an economic boon to the city, creating jobs and revitalizing Market Street East. Opponents argue the benefits are overstated and come with deep risks, including displacement and economic loss for Chinatown residents and businesses and the possibility of traffic gridlock near Jefferson Hospital’s trauma center if enough fans do not take public transit to games. A September poll, commissioned by an activist group and conducted by a firm previously contracted by Parker, showed general citywide opposition to the plan.
The Mayor made a few digs at the “No Arena” movement throughout the night, despite emphasizing repeatedly that people had a right to voice their opposition. At one point, Parker seemed to suggest that some opposition to the arena could be coming from out-of-towners and online “bots.”
“I get a lot of calls and a lot of emails from a lot of people who are wasting their opinions,” Parker said. “They don’t necessarily tell us whether or not they’re from Philadelphia. And when it’s social media — don’t laugh at me, I’m a dinosaur — on social media, I didn’t know, did you all know that sometimes it’s not real people? … They call these things bots.”
Parker also levied a critique that arena opponents have frequently used towards her: the idea of inciting resentment between racial groups.
“I’ve been watching what people are doing. I’ve been watching people trying to pit one community against another community,” the Mayor said. “This is the kind of divide-and-conquer strategy that will make Philadelphia lose, and try to get one neighborhood against the other. This is about one village: all neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia.”
Key to the virtually universal opposition from Chinatown residents and other activist groups is a city-commissioned impact study on the arena which projected that Chinatown could lose its “core identity and regional significance” as a result of indirect displacement, and that half of the neighborhood’s businesses could lose economically from the development.
Parker did not mention that aspect of the study, but said multiple times that she was committed to preserving Chinatown and that the arena would not cause it harm. She invoked Mount Airy’s neighborhood struggles during the drug epidemic of the ‘80s, arguing that she had seen periods of economic devastation firsthand and did not want to induce similar outcomes.
“But why are you so ultra-sensitive, Cherelle, about affirming that you support Chinatown?” the Mayor asked rhetorically. “Because I know what happened to my neighborhood.”
Parker credited PennDOT’s investment in a center on Ogontz Avenue as helping revitalize the street after that period of economic decline, framing the arena as a larger mirror to that change. She also hit hard on Market Street revitalization, which received a building-by-building planning presentation later in the night.
“Wanamaker’s represented value. It represented quality in the city of Philadelphia,” Parker said, recalling the iconic, departed department store. “No longer is Market Street connected to the kind of quality that we are accustomed to here in the city of Philadelphia. And I’m not just looking backwards. It’s important to have a historical perspective because you know what can be.”
Parker was met with murmurs of agreement, laughter, and applause from a good portion of the room as she spoke, as were some of the more charismatic city officials who gave presentations. But the majority of those in the audience who took to the mic to ask questions were either opposed to the arena or on the fence. Most of those skeptics did not mention potential displacement in Chinatown, but did express distrust about the purported economic benefits of the plan, the issues of traffic and transit, and planned safety measures.
One attendee, Larry West, pointed out previous development projects that did not successfully revitalize Center City.
“We’ve heard this time and time again,” West said. “ ‘We’ll redevelop Reading Terminal, we’ll get more businesses. We’ll redevelop the [Gallery] mall, we’ll get more businesses. We’ll expand the Convention Center, tear down two city blocks, and we’ll get more economic development.’ What is different this time than every other time we promise economic development by developing that particular area?”
“This is the first time it’s occurred on my watch as the Mayor of the city of Philadelphia,” Parker said in her answer, and argued that the project’s community benefits agreement with the Sixers would be more reliably enforceable by the city than similar arena construction projects in other states.
Sam Rhoades, Executive Vice President of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, followed with his own answer.
“I don’t think you’ve heard any of us say that the success of Market Street is guaranteed,” Rhoades said, “but I will say that there’s a number of things that are different.” He highlighted the amount of private funds invested in the arena site and nearby vacant buildings on Market Street’s south side.
Pushback the next morning
Tuesday morning, the ad hoc activist group Black Philly for Chinatown held a press conference at City Hall to make a very different argument about the arena.
“We are a collective of Black people who are tired of the lie being told that this arena will benefit our communities, because it absolutely will not,” the group’s MC said on Tuesday, standing with a group of politicians and activists.
Councilmember Kendra Brooks, one of City Hall’s most outspoken arena opponents, said she didn’t trust the Parker Administration’s arguments.
“I’ve heard promises that this arena would revitalize Market Street and it would create thousands of family-sustaining jobs for Black folks in the city,” Brooks said. “Every time I or one of my colleagues asks the tough questions, we hear promises that they’ll get back to us — with all the questions that we ask.”
State representative Chris Rabb, whose district includes Mount Airy, was at the press conference as well. He said he wasn’t invited to Parker’s town hall.
“I would have loved to be invited to that meeting in my neighborhood. I found out about it too late,” Rabb told Billy Penn.
“The benefit of us enjoying things in Center City or elsewhere should not be at the expense of other communities,” Rabb said, pushing back on Parker’s Market Street nostalgia. “And we have to remember, for those of us who are Black, we are always the expendable ones. We are the ones whose neighborhoods were cut up by highways, by institutions for the benefit of other people to play and to earn. So we need to pay it forward and do the right thing and make sure that all of our communities are safe.”
Later in the day, City Councilman Mark Squilla said the Sixers had agreed to pay for transit passes on SEPTA for Sixers’ season ticketholders, as part of the effort to lessen traffic congestion. This apparently is part of the community benefits agreement already agreed to.
Regardless, City Council voted to continue the legislative process on a 10-3 vote, with Councilmembers Rue Landau and Jamie Gauthier joining Brooks in opposition. The two said they oppose the current deal, but were open to continue negotiating.
