Chinatown is looking forward to an especially joyous Lunar New Year, celebrating not only the Year of the Snake but also the demise of the Sixers arena project, which it saw as a viper ready to strike at the community.
It turned out that the mayor and City Council bit the bullet when the team stunningly abandoned its plan to build a $1.3 billion basketball stadium on complex East Market Street.
But among the red and gold roll “No Arena” victory games. — 300 people packed into the Folk Arts–Cultural Treasures Charter School on Tuesday to cheer and dance — uncertainty looms over the future of the historic Asian American neighborhood, impacted by economic pressures and the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, and tired of something, what can seem like an endless series of life and death struggles.
Neighborhood leaders say that about every seven years, Chinatown faces the prospect of a huge, epic development – a prison, a casino, a Phillies baseball stadium – requiring the community to devote time, energy and money to maintaining its identity. The Sixers’ arena battle lasted two and a half years, ending abruptly on Jan. 12 with the news that the team would remain in South Philadelphia.
“It’s exhausting,” said John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corp. “Our parents rose to the top to become small business owners and lived in fear that our roots would be uprooted and the Chinatown they gave us might eventually disappear, which takes a huge toll on your emotions.
He said if the outflow of arena fighting can have a positive effect, it means the community and the city have gained insight into Chinatown’s needs. “It confirmed our understanding of the challenges facing Chinatown and opened our eyes to the possibilities,” Chin said.
Chinatown needs housing. It needs space for commercial development. It needs green space and space to gather – beyond the benches at the 10th Street Plaza and in front of the House of Dragons fire station. Needs parking as 20% space available disappeared between 2015 and 2020According to a city survey, destroyed by fresh development.
Today, Chinatown faces the imminent arrival of a Trump administration that is hostile not only to enormous Democrat-run cities like Philadelphia, but also to the immigrants for whom the neighborhood has been a gateway for 150 years.
“It’s a time to celebrate, but we also have to look carefully to the future,” he said Philadelphia Suns youth group President Harry Leong, who was born and raised in Chinatown.
Some critical work is already underway, most notably “Chinatown Stitch,” which proposes reconnecting the severed neighborhood by covering part of the underground Vine Street Expressway. The construction of the highway in the 1970s divided the neighborhood and created a physical and mental barrier that has hampered development for 50 years.
Now a $158 million federal grant aims to tie Chinatown to the area known as Chinatown North, reconnecting it to the neighborhood and at least partially righting a historic wrong.
Chin believes the Stitch could potentially become the center of an expanded Chinatown district, the natural heart of the north and south communities.
Planning will be crucial. The arena deal, approved by the City Council only last month, called for $500,000 to be used to create a master plan for Market East, where business closures have devastated the city’s former great commercial corridor.
That money, however, was tied to the construction of an arena on the south end of Chinatown, not to the team building the facility in South Philadelphia with its owner, Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Wells Fargo Center and the Flyers.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said she trusts the newly formed Sixers and Comcast Spectacor alliance, which have been at loggerheads over a competitive future, to keep their promise to support improve the Market East area. The city also remains committed to the business corridor, she said, promising that the master planning process will begin “immediately.”
Some Chinatown leaders said last week that “the sky’s the limit” when it comes to rethinking the corridor and the ways it could support Chinatown.
According to Mohan Seshadri, executive director of the Asian Pacific Islanders Political Alliance, and Wei Chen, director of engagement for the Save Chinatown Coalition, a community center, a health clinic, a school and a miniature business incubator are just some examples. Asian Americans United, a support group.
Also on their list: an immigrant “hospitality district” that will centralize employment, housing and language resources for fresh arrivals. The idea was floated last spring by the Welcoming Center, an immigrant support agency, but arena supporters called it unrealistic.
“We know that eventually [planning] the results will not be 100% consistent with anyone’s individual vision,” Seshadri said. “We learned a lot about the importance of reaching all communities across the city and not just focusing solely on people in our sphere of influence.”
Chinatown helped build and lead the No Arena in the Heart of Our City Coalition, a multiracial group including community organizations, health care workers, miniature businesses, union members, workers, churches and city districts that united to stop the construction of arenas on the streets 10th and Market.
Coalition members noted that despite differences in location, age and income, they all faced “the same fundamental problem: Philadelphia’s neighborhoods and ordinary residents are not being taken into account by the people who are supposed to represent us, and development is being driven by billionaires – and city officials who think they work for them [the wealthy]” said Ellen Somekawa, executive director of FACTS, a charter school in Chinatown North.
Chinatowns across the United States are under pressure to survive and thrive, challenged by their proximity to shiny downtowns with higher housing prices and their attractiveness to outside developers because of their land and location. The pandemic punished these districts as legions of workers delayed returning to offices or did not return at all.
In 2023, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Philadelphia’s Chinatown as one of the 11 most endangered historic sites in the United Statesciting the arena as the main threat.
The neighborhood, whose core stretches roughly from Vine Street to Filbert Street and 11th to 8th, faced significant challenges even before the project was announced in July 2022.
The population has almost doubled since 2011, to 6,919 from 3,841, but the cost of living has also increased. Since 2014, median property taxes have increased 64% for commercial properties and 66% for mixed-use properties, according to a city-sponsored neighborhood impact study.
The study found that Chinatown struggles with safety, pedestrian traffic and a poor business environment. Higher rents have displaced low-income immigrants, and the loss of parking has squeezed a neighborhood struggling to welcome suburban visitors, shoppers and tourists struggling with slow traffic.
The Sixers maintained that Chinatown businesses would only benefit from having an arena, and the team, the mayor and some City Council members saw the project as crucial to revitalizing East Market Street. Just three days before news of the Sixers’ change in direction leaked, Parker’s administration touted the arena as an “anchor” of Market Street that would encourage new investment even before it was built.
Last Monday, the mayor did not explain how the new plan would be financed. And its pledge to “engage meaningful community input” sounded hollow to Chinatown supporters.
“Nothing they say gives us confidence that they think about it any differently than when they thought the arena was a good idea,” Somekawa said.
Chinatown, she and others noted, serves many nations, constituencies, and functions, creating an ecosystem in which the health of each part depends on the others.
It’s a first stop for immigrants trying to find their footing, a familiar home for second- and third-generation Asian Americans, a cultural center for all Asian communities in the region, and for non-Asians who simply enjoy the food, clubs and shopping.
Some people spend their lives in Chinatown because it offers what they need: doctors, dentists, insurers and hairdressers who have the same experience and speak and write the same language.
“Suddenly we have entered a new phase,” API PA’s Seshadri said. “It’s time for conversations that should have happened a long time ago. Who does Philadelphia work for? Who does the City Council work for? … We hope to bring community voices to the table from now on.”
