Sixers close out their first round of community information sessions on downtown arena

Thursday night marked the end of the Sixers’ first series of five online forums, over the course of which the team executives talked about their plans for a new downtown arena.

Throughout the sessions — which the Sixers said turned out hundreds of people from areas neighboring the proposed arena — the Sixers group repeated its assertions about the benefits the arena would bring to Center City, from generating tax revenue for the city, to creating jobs, to driving spending in neighboring communities.

But they also fielded questions from participants that evinced skepticism and lack of trust in the team’s downtown dreams, such as their promises to support diverse businesses, the reliability of their traffic and parking projections, and their commitment to creating affordable housing.

The consistent throughline during the conversations was the arena’s potential future neighbor: Chinatown.

David Gould, the chief diversity and impact officer for Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns and operates the Sixers, started off Thursday night’s meeting the way he has each one: saying that the Sixers wanted to use these community sessions to address false information about the arena proposal.

The Sixers started off with a 35-minute slideshow presentation about the arena before answering questions. Participants could only see team executives throughout the sessions — not one another nor the submitted questions. Gould picked questions offscreen to paraphrase before calling on team executives to answer.

At the beginning of Thursday’s session, Gould said the Sixers “want to provide a format that is free from the distractions and chaos that can sometimes get in the way of absorbing a large amount of information.” A 76 Place spokesperson said that they would be releasing, unedited, all the questions received throughout the sessions.

The chosen format fostered more mistrust among some community members, who called the meetings infomercials.

“Zoom webinars are a poor excuse for real community engagement and are not a format where the community feels seen, heard, or respected,” Neeta Patel, interim executive director of the community organization Asian Americans United, said in a news release.

It was not a forum, she said, where people could feel heard, especially for Chinatown residents who are older, don’t speak English, and struggle with technology. (76 Place said the online forums made it possible for more people to attend the information sessions.)

The Sixers provided Mandarin and Cantonese interpretation at two meetings, but the Mandarin meeting was flooded with technical difficulties that ultimately turned away non-English speakers.

“The developers had over a year, and they still don’t even know how to translate for the community.”

“The interpretation was garbled and didn’t make sense, and we left early because we couldn’t understand anything the developers were saying,” Wang Yu Ming, a Chinatown business owner, said in a statement. “The developers had over a year, and they still don’t even know how to translate for the community.”

A 76 Place spokesperson said they tried to quickly address issues with the interpretation lag in the Mandarin meeting and made sure that the same issues did not arise in the Cantonese meeting. Community members agreed that the Cantonese meeting went smoothly.

The format also meant that participants were not able to contest any of the claims, which Patel called “canned spin.” Community organizers took to social media to broadcast their reactions, including raising concerns about a lack of transparency over one of the speakers the Sixers brought to their Tuesday Cantonese meeting, Lee Huang.

President of the company Econsult Solutions Inc., Huang is consulting for 76 Place. But he also sits on the board of Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. (PIDC), the city’s public-private economic development agency responsible for running the city’s independent impact studies — which the Sixers are paying for.

““There will be board members who are supporters and opponents of any major project.”

“These aren’t independent city analyses,” tweeted Students for the Preservation of Chinatown (SPOC). “These ‘studies’ are literally bankrolled by the same people who stand to make billions off the arena’s approval.”

Huang said in a statement that he has recused himself from the impact studies because of the conflict of interest.

“There will be board members who are supporters and opponents of any major project. … It is that diversity of opinion that should give people confidence that the process will be fair,” a spokesperson for 76 Place said in an email.

Chinatown had the biggest offscreen presence in the community sessions, with many participants raising questions about how the Sixers will preserve the cultural integrity of the historic neighborhood and ensure residents and business owners won’t get priced out.

Team executives responded with promises that they will not displace any businesses or residents, but did not get into specifics on how they can control and stop gentrification from taking place.

Gould specifically mentioned the community benefits agreement the Sixers will be negotiating with affected neighborhoods and said there would be a particular focus on supporting Chinatown businesses.

The Sixers’ plans to build a 20-floor residential tower on top of the arena, with 20% of the 395 housing units designated as affordable housing, was also mentioned as a solution.

“Zoom webinars are a poor excuse for real community engagement, and are not a format where the community feels seen, heard, or respected.”

“We will be communicating with the community to determine what that affordability needs to be to meet the needs,” said Leslie Smallwood-Lewis, cofounder and CEO of Mosaic Development Partners and part of the arena’s development team.

Smallwood-Lewis said that determination would be based on area median income and emphasized that the Chinatown community will be prioritized for the affordable housing units, since they will be most impacted by the arena.

Mosaic has “been in this space for a very long time, and it is the most important tenet for us to make sure that development in the city is equitable,” she said. “I am confident that we will be able to achieve the diversity that we are seeking to, and shame on us if we don’t, because this is a project that’s too large for us not to have the level of impact that it can have in the city.”