“When they raze these streets, I’ll no longer
know which way my toes are pointed.”
— Dylan Tran, “My Soul Travels Between Three Cities”
On December 19th, 2024, Philadelphia City Council voted 12–5 to approve 76 Place, a controversial arena on the border of Philadelphia Chinatown. The 76ers basketball team’s co-owners had faced persistent opposition since announcing their plans in July 2022. Organizers described the arena as an existential danger given the 90% reduction of the Chinese population of Washington, DC’s Chinatown following a similar development. Two mass demonstrations against 76 Place drew thousands. An August 2024 poll found 69% of Philadelphia voters were opposed.
On the day of the vote, three dozen community activists swarmed the chamber floor, chanting “Council sellouts!” until dragged away by police. Though the vote was delayed for hours, the arena was subsequently overwhelmingly approved.
Twelve Democratic and Republican councilmembers voted for the arena, with only two Democrats and the two Working Families Party councilmembers voting against. Particularly significant was the pro-arena stance of councilmember Mark Squilla, whose district includes Chinatown and the proposed arena site. Philadelphia City Council’s informal tradition of “councilmanic prerogative” gives each of the 10 councilmembers de facto veto power over zoning decisions within their district, and it was Squilla who introduced the successful arena legislation. After years of protest and public engagement, the community campaign to stop 76 Place by amassing an anti-arena majority on the Philadelphia City Council was badly defeated.
And then, against all expectations, the campaign won. Three weeks later, the 76ers declared that they wouldn’t be pursuing a Chinatown arena, after all. Rather than stop paying rent to Comcast (owner of their current home, South Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center) to build their own arena by Chinatown, the Sixers would partner with Comcast to build a new South Philly arena as a “50–50 joint venture.” NBA commissioner Adam Silver had evidently fostered a reconciliation between the 76ers’ billionaire co‑owners and Comcast CEO Brian L. Roberts after Comcast and the NBA signed a TV deal (Walsh and Coffey 2025). “Whatever the reason for the 180-decision,” wrote columnist Stephanie Farr, “the fate of this major project was not decided by the people or the politicians we elected to represent us, but by billionaires who may never reveal what fueled their choices, because, frankly, they don’t have to” (Farr 2025).
The anti-arena campaign mobilized thousands of Philadelphians and embroiled the 76 Place proposal in controversy. We cannot claim popular opposition was the sole factor in its demise, though as Farr reminds us, the billionaires involved are under no obligation to “reveal what fueled their choices” either way. When choosing between two sites for a new arena, however, the 76ers’ owners opted for the one unburdened by widespread public disapproval and an oppositional social movement with a demonstrated willingness to risk arrest.
The balance of forces
Opposition to 76 Place was organized by the Save Chinatown Coalition, anchored by Asian Americans United (AAU), a Philadelphia 501(c)(3) formed in 1985 against anti-Asian violence (Kurashige 2000), and the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (APIPA), a 501(c)(4) political advocacy nonprofit. They articulated a strategy that focused on pressuring city council through petitions, call-ins, and permitted marches.
A number of grassroots organizations rounded out the coalition, including No Arena in Chinatown Solidarity (NACS, now Neighbors & Communities in Solidarity), a group of non-Chinatown Philadelphians; No Arena Gayborhood, residents of Philadelphia’s adjacent historic LGBT district; No Arena Philly Med, comprising healthcare workers at the nearby Thomas Jefferson University Hospital; and Black Philly for Chinatown, an ad hoc group opposing claims by 76 Place developers’ that the arena’s hypothetical employment of Black Philadelphians would constitute a victory for racial justice. High school students mobilized as Students Against the Sixers Arena (SASA) while college students organized Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC). SPOC and SASA organizers went on to form the Ginger Arts Center, a youth and community space in the area.
Bilingual “Save Chinatown, No Arena” posters covered Chinatown walls as anti-arena messaging appeared in the windows of homes and storefronts across the city . The Save Chinatown Coalition delivered 15,000 handwritten postcards from Philadelphians opposing 76 Place to City Council in April 2023. Two weeks later, thousands marched to City Hall, chanting “Hands off Chinatown!” A second mass mobilization the following September was even larger. By then, most Philadelphia voters were against the arena proposal, with just 12% believing its location ideal and 60% preferring the 76ers remain in South Philadelphia.
Opposition to 76 Place was not unanimous. The Sixers are co-owned by David Adelman, who leads the national student housing firm Campus Apartments; Josh Harris, co-founder of private equity behemoth Apollo Global Management; and David Blitzer, Global Head of Tactical Opportunities for Blackstone. The arena developers announced they would seek no city funding, while politicians parroted business leaders’ language emphasizing the urgency of “revitalizing” the Market East area. Mayor Cherelle Parker announced a $50 million community benefits agreement, though Chinatown institutions were not involved in negotiations. The developers secured endorsements from the African American Chamber of Commerce, the Black Clergy of Philadelphia and Vicinity, and the adult branch of the Philadelphia NAACP—though the local youth branch publicly objected that they had never been consulted.
Stoking Black-Asian racial tensions was especially brazen given the 76 Place developers’ personal investment in displacing Black neighborhoods in West Philadelphia. After the 1958 murder of a Korean graduate student, the University of Pennsylvania began to “secure its borders” from Black residents surrounding its West Philadelphia campus, while initiating the gentrification of the Black Bottom neighborhood into the area now known as University City (Hines 2020). The number of manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia had peaked years earlier. Over the next half-century, manufacturing plummeted from 359,000 to less than 30,000 workers in the city once dubbed the “Workshop to the World.” By 1970, the Black Bottom had lost around 5,000 families to “Penntrification.” The city’s population dropped through the following decade, its economic base pivoting to “knowledge-based services” such as biotechnology research and universities. Philadelphia, which had become a “pioneer” of gentrification with the “remarkable revival of Society Hill in the 1950s,” and engineered the “revitalization” of neighborhoods like Old City, Northern Liberties, and Manayunk (Simon and Allnut 2007, 425). From 2010 to 2019, 27,000 people moved into gentrifying neighborhoods across Philadelphia. The Black populations of such neighborhoods declined by 11,000, with Philadelphia losing 30,000 Black residents during the decade. West Philadelphia’s continued redevelopment was anchored by the University City District—a special services district co-founded by 76 Place lead developer David Adelman.
76 Place was also heavily supported by the overwhelmingly white, reactionary building trades unions that endorsed Parker’s mayoral bid, enticed by the promise of union jobs. Though organized labor and urban communities of color are identified as components of a broad progressive coalition, building trades unions around the country ally with big business as part of the municipal “progrowth regime” (DeLeon 1992, 46). Union members appeared at months of City Council meetings wearing pro-arena shirts, rallying outside City Hall as a circling sound truck blared the 76ers victory song. These unions have extraordinary political clout, with International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union chief John Dougherty serving as a statewide “Democratic power broker” until his convictions for corruption and embezzlement. The combination of union, developer, and university-adjacent support was sufficient to secure almost unanimous political support for the arena development.
Popular will and private initiative
Councilmember Kendra Brooks said her colleagues’ pro-arena vote “demonstrates how far we have to go to truly listen to and reflect the voices of our community instead of the voices of the wealthy few.” Despite the campaign narrowly targeting councilmembers as strategic targets, City Council was not the mechanism by which the defeat of the arena was accomplished.
By then, the 76ers’ owners had alienated both Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker, who had hailed the “historic game-changing economic development project,” and the entirety of City Council, 12 of whom had likewise expended political capital to support the failed arena, with the remainder opposing it entirely. For the owners of the 76ers, universally antagonizing their home city’s elected officials was an evidently acceptable business cost. A civic engagement campaign was insufficient to counteract the lobbying by an institution so powerful that it was willing to alienate the entirety of the local political class.
Depending upon the mechanisms of accountability offered by municipal representative democracy is fraught since “displacement is nonetheless compatible with electoral interests” so long as new arrivals support the ruling party (Chou and Dancygier 2021). Those most harmed by gentrification cease to be constituents of the area from which they were priced out. Gentrification’s victims exit an electorate increasingly composed of its beneficiaries. The disenfranchised residents of neighborhoods at risk of displacement inhabit cities whose “pronounced orientation to the world markets” increasingly “raises questions about the articulation with their nation-states, their regions, and the larger economic and social structure” (Sassen 2004, p. 38).
Though the Save Chinatown Campaign failed to sway council votes, it tarnished the project and likely contributed to its defeat. The struggle against 76 Place reminds us of the significance of community organizing, which in this case forged multiple grassroots organizations, created politically generative connections, and productively polarized a city against a predatory development. But the campaign results also raise the question of to what degree such organizing must assume the role of electoral advocacy in order to succeed. If the developers of gentrifying mega-projects readily ignore or manipulate the mechanisms for accountability that residents are offered by the democratic capitalist state, a successful anti-gentrification movement might view such mechanisms as a floor, not a ceiling: a stage for the accumulation of forces to be deployed on more hospitable terrain than that offered by the state for the articulation of grievance and performance of dissent.
The question of electoral pressure strategies will remain alive for future campaigns against gentrifying mega-projects, perhaps including one situated at the same location. Comcast and the 76ers have announced their commitment to continuing to pursue the “revitalization” of the proposed arena site on Chinatown’s border. In the half year after 76 Place was cancelled, they purchased a series of additional properties across the street for a total of $56 million. Though no details of their new plans for the site have been released, Comcast had previously proposed that it become, instead of an arena, a biomedical research “Innovation Hub”—exactly the kind of “knowledge economy” development that heralded the gentrification of the Black Bottom (Gammage 2024). The Save Chinatown Coalition connected Chinatown community members with architects and urban planners to articulate a countervailing “People’s Vision” for the arena site, with affordable housing overlooking publicly accessible green space.
Bibliography
- Chou, W. and Dancygier, R. 2021. “Why Parties Displace Their Voters: Gentrification, Coalitional Change, and the Demise of Public Housing”, American Political Science Review, vol. 115, no. 2, pp. 429–449).
- Dean, J. 2020. “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 12 May.
- DeLeon, R. 1992. Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
- Farr, S. 2025. “Billionaires may shape Philly’s landscape, but they do not define our character”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 January.
- Gammage, J. 2024. “New proposal would turn Philly’s Fashion District into a biomedical hub instead of a Sixers arena”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 September.
- Hines, A. 2020. “The University Fix and John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire”, American Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1, pp. 129–153.
- Kurashige, S. 2000. “Pan-Ethnicity and Community Organizing: Asian Americans United’s Campaign Against Anti-Asian Violence”, Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 163–190.
- Logan, J. and Molotch, H. 1997. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Mendonça de Almeida, K. 2020. Why isn’t Google welcome in Kreuzberg?, master’s degree thesis, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
- Sassen, S. 2004. “The global city: Introducing a concept”, Brown Journal of World Affairs, no. 11, pp. 27–43.
- Simon, R. and Alnutt, A. 2007. “Philadelphia, 1982–2007: Toward the Postindustrial City”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 131, no. 4, pp. 395–444.
- Walsh, S. C. and Coffey, A. 2025. “How NBA commissioner Adam Silver put an end to a billionaires’ feud and helped keep the Sixers in South Philly”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 January.
Further reading
- Lee, A. 2024. Defying Displacement: Urban Recomposition and Social War, Chico: AK Press.
