That plan for a new $1.3 billion Philadelphia 76ers arena across the street from Center City’s Greyhound bus station has a new twist: It would actually be so big that it would spread across Filbert Street and replace the bus station, according to the plan’s developers:
“We have that under contract,” confirmed David Adelman, the Philadelphia developer working with Sixers managing partners Josh Harris and David Blitzer to build a new arena. He declined to provide more details about the arrangement, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
(Pause to boggle at a developer saying he can’t reveal details of his own plan because he made himself sign an NDA. Done boggling? Okay, let’s continue.)
Why should any Sixers fans, Philadelphia residents, or anyone else care about this news, unless they were planning to take the bus to games? Couple of reasons: First off, there’s that 30-year city property tax break that the mall the arena would mostly be built on top of gets, and which the team owners say they want to inherit. If the Sixers owners want to extend that to the Greyhound site — and it’s hard to picture how they would get a tax break on the southern half of an arena but not the northern half — then expanding the arena footprint could end up making for a bigger public subsidy.
Then, also, there’s the whole question of how the arena will affect the neighboring Chinatown, whose residents are already worrying about traffic and gentrification impacts, just as they did 20 years ago when the Phillies owners were looking at building a stadium on their neighborhood’s northern edge. The gentrification issue is slightly overblown — without getting too far into the weeds right now, sports venues mostly only seem to lead to massive neighborhood change when neighborhoods are already being targeted for redevelopment — but obviously tearing down the bus station, which right now acts as a partial buffer between Center City and Chinatown, would make it more likely that an arena leads to more redevelopment to the north. (It can’t help that local business leaders are openly pushing the Washington Wizards‘ arena as a model, since that building helped wipe out a good chunk of D.C.’s Chinatown after it opened in 1997.)
The Philadelphia Inquirer notes that “Greyhound has lately asked for help from public officials in relocating to make way for the next user,” so clearly there are a lot of moving parts here that could end up requiring public money. Sometimes I feel bad for looking every “all-privately-funded” horse in the mouth, but mostly my reflexive cynicism ends up working out pretty well.
And, naturally, I assume the Sixers will not foot the bill on replacing or helping build a new Greyhound station because as we all know, Greyhound has the reputation of only poor people or weirdos riding their buses and God forbid those riders have anything nice.
(I say that as someone who has rode on Greyhound plenty of times.)
The whole reason I know anything about that Greyhound terminal is that I’ve taken buses to there many times. (NJ Transit to SEPTA is more pleasant, but also pricier and usually slower.)
Urban renewal now means eliminating anything that benefits the poor.
You don’t even have to build anything in it’s place… just demolish a bus terminal, public toilets, a laundromat, anything someone poor might actually want/need to use.
Never forget who our politicians actually work for. If it was the average citizen, there would be full time policing on public transit everywhere…. instead we commit vast resources to equipping police forces with military hardware they will never (and should never) use.
For reference, the new (1989) Chicago Greyhound terminal cost $14 million. It has 12 gates. Current Philly has 14.
My mom is so poor, that when she gets mad she can’t afford to fly off the handle so she’s got to Greyhound off the handle.