A new idea for Market East: A ‘Welcoming District’ for immigrants who are driving population growth

A group of Philadelphians have an idea they think can lift Market Street East, the central commercial corridor that’s suffering under the triple weight of vacant stores, empty offices and vanished foot traffic.

They want to make it the site of a “Welcoming District” for immigrants, the people whose steady arrival is fueling job and population growth in Philadelphia.

Such a district could centralize services in housing, health care, employment, and language access, while cementing Philadelphia’s status as a city that embraces newcomers from around the world.

At the same time, the flow of new people could help support existing businesses in Market East, which lost customers and commuters amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And immigrants are job-creators, starting businesses at far higher rates than native-born Americans, which also could benefit the area.

“We wanted to bring some new ideas to bat,” said architect Brian Phillips, the principal at ISA - Interface Studio Architects LLC, who teaches graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania.

The idea makes sense to John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp., especially at a time when the city’s Asian population is surging — and when he and others say their historic neighborhood is threatened by the Sixers’ plan to build a $1.55 billion, 18,500-seat arena and housing tower at 10th and Market Streets.

The thinking around a Welcoming District began percolating last fall, when Phillips asked architectural students to consider how the Fashion District, the ailing, three-block mall where the Sixers intend to build, might be used to create housing and entrepreneurship opportunities for new arrivals.

PCDC and the Welcoming Center, an immigrant-support agency, joined the project. Earlier this month, Chin and Phillips were among those who spoke to designers, developers, advocates and architects about a new move on Market East. More than 100 people showed up to see concepts at the Center for DesignPhiladelphia, formerly the Center for Architecture and Design on Arch Street.

Today, 15.7% of Philadelphia residents were born outside the United States, the highest share since the 1940s, according to a new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. The foreign-born population more than doubled from 105,000 in 1990 to 232,000 in 2022, even as the overall city population grew very little, census figures show.

In recent years the city led in helping people displaced by war, assisting more than 30,000 Afghan allies through Philadelphia International Airport after Kabul fell to the Taliban, and continuing to aid Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion of their homeland.

Last year, Philadelphia won a designation as “Certified Welcoming,” the largest city in the country so named, granted by nonprofit Welcoming America to places that commit to including and supporting immigrants.

Baltimore, New York and San Diego County have set up welcome centers in bids to centralize services, though on-site housing is not usually part of the project. Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, opened a center to meet the needs of people representing more than 120 nationalities, a diversity met or surpassed in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia schools teach students who speak 160 different languages at home, and the percentage of children who are English-learners has grown from 9% to 17% in the last eight years.

Located Immediately south of Chinatown, Market East still holds strong assets, including access to rail, subway and bus service; historic architecture; and parking lots and vacancies that, while troubling, also offer prime space for redevelopment.

The Sixers’ plan to build atop Jefferson Station has drawn support from construction-trade unions and several African American organizations, including this month’s endorsement by the Philadelphia branch of the NAACP.

The Sixers declined to comment on ideas of a Welcoming Center. Earlier this year, when a different group brainstormed alternates for the arena site and faltering mall, the team pointed out that it alone had put forth a firm proposal and had money to pay for it.

The heart of the eight-block stretch of Market between City Hall and Independence Mall needs the most help. That’s where the team intends to build on what is now the western third of the Fashion District, insisting the project will bring money and vitality.

Some businesspeople there see the team’s billion-dollar investment as the chance of a lifetime, a means to dramatically redirect a thoroughfare that’s been slipping for years.

But nearly two years after the Sixers announced their plan, they still await City Council approval. Government-sponsored impact studies are months overdue.

In January, more than a hundred people gathered to suggest different uses for the site — a library, high school, playground, health clinic, apartments — at a session led by Chinatown activists.

At this month’s event at DesignPhiladelphia, panelist Anuj Gupta, president and CEO of the Welcoming Center, called the Sixers arena “a vision of speculation,” reliant on the idea that people will come and spend at a particular part of the city if the right mix of attraction and retail can be achieved.

That’s been a 50-year hope on Market East, he said, in which the struggling, 1970s-era Gallery mall gave way in 2019 to its Fashion District successor, and now perhaps to a basketball arena.

The future must be built on facts, Gupta said. That there will be no second baby boom like the one that injected 70 million people into the population after World War II. That the droves who are moving to Florida and other Sun Belt states are not going to suddenly change course and head to Pennsylvania.

That the people who are coming here are immigrants.

The Welcoming District forum was hosted by the Design Advocacy Group (DAG), which pushes for high-quality planning and architecture in Philadelphia. Last year the DAG executive committee said a Sixers arena would not only fail to revitalize East Market Street but also would “make matters worse.”

The Penn student proposals for the Fashion District space could replace an arena or sit near or beside it, even if it might not be the easiest fit.

“We used our imaginations,” said Ariel Koltun-Fromm, who envisioned housing organized around food.

He suggested living areas that would not have kitchens but would tie to communal stoves and dining spaces as a means to connect people. Larger, commercial kitchens could support start-up restaurants, cafes and catering businesses.

“If you are a new arrival, an immigrant, or any kind of new person to the city, you need an economic foothold, someplace just to get some income flowing,” Koltun-Fromm said. “And you need community, a sense of belonging.”

Panelist Tayyib Smith, a real estate developer, entrepreneur and consultant at S&R Holdings, said he would frame a Welcoming District as being “for immigrants and long-term residents.”

A solution for the Fashion District site must be “holistic and thoughtful,” he said, not limited to winners and losers. “Many good things versus one big thing makes a lot more sense.”

Phillips confirmed that nobody interested in a Welcoming District has money to build one. But, he said, no one should act as if development on Market East has been free.

Taxpayers sunk millions of dollars into the creation of the Gallery, millions more into the Fashion District, and helped pay for the Convention Center and other projects.

A Welcoming District is “very speculative,” Phillips said, “but there are lots of things that have been proposed for Market East that are speculative.”