In Chinatown, joy and relief as Sixers abandon plan to build an arena on the neighborhood’s southern edge

A Chinatown community that believed its ruination lay in the planned construction of a new Sixers arena rejoiced on Sunday as the team abandoned its efforts to build on the neighborhood’s southern doorstep.

For more than two years the community resisted the $1.3 billion project, pointing to multiple studies and findings and citing the city’s own analysis, which projected damaging losses to businesses — only to see its pleas ignored by a mayor who cheered the development and a City Council that voted 12-5 in favor.

“I’m feeling elated,” said Mary Yee, a veteran Chinatown organizer who helped lead opposition, as word spread on Sunday.

She expected organizations that led the fight would be holding celebrations this week, and that the coming of the Lunar New Year on Jan. 29 — the Year of the Snake — promised to be especially festive.

At the same time, Yee said, “The mayor and Council really got played. … We’re glad it’s a victory, but all of this could have been avoided.”

So many city departments, agencies, elected officials, and consultants devoted untold hours and dollars to a project that Chinatown leaders said from the start was fatally flawed — and on Sunday left the Market Street East business corridor where it began, with giant questions about its future.

“I feel relief; I feel great,” said Derek Sam, known as Sam Sam, wearing his black kitchen apron as he stood in the middle of his Little Saigon Cafe restaurant. “They mess our life here in Chinatown for two and a half years.”

He was one of the faces at the front of the arena opposition. On Sunday, call after call arrived on his phone, alerting him to the news.

“Everybody say done deal, but no,” said the longtime Chinatown resident. “That means people [have] power.”

It was disheartening to see the plans roll forward in spite of the community’s wishes, he said, but “we conquer a big guy. … We saved our town for now.”

Multiple City Council members told The Inquirer on Sunday that the team had struck a deal with Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Flyers and the Wells Fargo Center, the current home of the Sixers, to remain in South Philadelphia. The Sixers and Comcast Spectacor will build a new arena there, said Ryan Boyer, head of the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, forgoing a Center City locale that the Sixers had described as key to their future and to that of the downtown.

On Sunday, Samantha Gross couldn’t contain her excitement that the project had moved away from Chinatown, saying “any sports team that knows how important Philly is — the Eagles, the Flyers, the Sixers, the Phillies — would know not to ruin neighborhoods that make Philly what it is.”

Gross, 32, who was adopted from China, moved to Chinatown last year, a sports fan who was dressed in an Eagles jacket on Sunday as she waited for a bus near the Chinatown Gate.

“This is one of the healthiest Chinatowns l’ve ever been to, and it would have been a shame to see it wiped out,” Gross said. “The Sixers are an important part of Philly, but I think also our sports culture is very much centered in that South Philly area, so to remove it like that feels dumb.”

For months and months, Chinatown leaders and residents marched, protested, held meetings, handed out fliers, sang, and lobbied — none of it seeming to make a difference to decision-makers.

Nor could a city-sponsored analysis delay plans for construction.

That study predicted that many small businesses in Chinatown would be hurt by the arena, and warned that under some scenarios, the neighborhood’s identity and significance could be lost. Harm to one segment of Chinatown’s intricate network of social, commercial and cultural systems could cause the others to tip and fall like a stack of blocks, the community-impact study said.

Half the small businesses in Chinatown would lose economically if the arena was built, while only one out of five was positioned to benefit. While the arena would not have directly displaced people from homes, because no housing would be demolished, the study said, there could be indirect displacement through accelerated gentrification, already a concern in a growing, changing community.

The Sixers maintained that Chinatown would not be harmed, that team developers were sensitive to the needs of the neighborhood and particularly to its painful history of intrusion and property loss.

Chinatown was founded in 1871 and today remains a gateway for immigrants.

All during the neighborhood’s fight against the arena, the losses of homes and land to outside developers were fresh in many minds, including members of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. and the Save Chinatown Coalition.

The construction of the Vine Street Expressway in the 1980s razed six blocks of single-room occupancies, rowhouses, and small industries, displacing more than 600 residents. In 1993, the development of the Pennsylvania Convention Center displaced 200 homes and businesses between 11th and 13th and Arch and Race Streets.

In succeeding decades, the neighborhood fought to keep out a casino and a Phillies baseball stadium.

Still, Chinatown has been essentially walled off by big projects including the former Police Headquarters, Temple University School of Podiatric Medicine, and the Gallery mall, now the Fashion District, where the Sixers had intended to build.

Despite the dissolution of the arena plan, Chinatown is a community under stress, facing challenges regarding safety, pedestrian movement, and a weak business environment. Its population has nearly doubled since 2011, up to 6,919 from 3,841, but so has the cost of living there.

Median real estate taxes have risen 64% for commercial properties and 66% for mixed-use properties since 2014. The neighborhood has lost parking spaces to development projects, even as the community seeks to welcome diners, shoppers, and tourists, and already struggles with traffic.

In a statement issued Sunday night, the No Arena coalition said it was “relieved to hear that the nightmare of a Center City Sixers arena will not haunt our city any more.” And it chastised those on City Council who approved it.

“We were clear from day one that it was dangerous to play in the viper pit with billionaires, but City Hall toyed with the snakes, and they got bit. 12 of 17 Councilmembers turned their backs on decades of research on the false promise of stadium developments, common sense, their voters, and the 70% of Philadelphians who opposed this arena,” said the coalition, which has scheduled a news conference for 12:30 p.m. Monday at the Friendship Arch.

Word of the canceled arena project spread quickly through Chinatown.

“My phone was blowing up,” Harry Leong said Sunday, as people called the leader of the Philadelphia Suns youth group from as far as New York and Florida.

“There’s a sense of relief, and a sense of being thankful this arena won’t affect not only our community, but the city. I’m glad it’s finally ‘not passed.’ It is a very happy situation.”

People in Chinatown have grown closer through the arena fight, he said, and “I’m hopeful we continue to grow as a community and a city. We need to come up with a really strategic plan for the Center City area.”