Please enjoy the worst pro-arena op-ed of 2023

With the stadium news firehose the way it is, I let a lot of op-eds and opinion columns go by without comment, because they’re not really news, and “random person with access to an op-ed page has feels” isn’t the best use of anyone’s time. But sometimes there’s an example of the genre that is so over-the-top bad that it just cries out to be pointed and laughed at, and this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed by columnist Kyle Sammin on the proposed 76ers arena is such a classic of the genre, it cries out for a point-by-point Muntzing:

Cities are always changing. It’s a fact of life, and it’s also usually a good thing. The dynamism of cities is what helps them remain compelling places to live and work.

This is the opening paragraph, and it sets the tone by being straightforward, mansplainy, and increasingly nonsensical the more you think about it. Change is good! Like, all change? Is gentrification that prices people out of their current neighborhoods good? Are development projects that fail to spark any development good? Are fires that burn down two entire city blocks because the police decided to bomb people they didn’t like good? Usually, apparently, anything in the future that’s different from the past is “dynamism,” so we should embrace it with both arms!

There have always been some Philadelphians who hear bold visions of what the region and city can be and say yes to them. There has also always been another group — often louder, if not bigger — that wants to say no and settle for the status quo.

“Naysayers,” everybody drink!

Public stadium and arena funding has been criticized as wasteful and corrupt for decades. Here, those complaints are answered: The wealthy owners of the Sixers will pay for the whole $1.3 billion cost themselves.

Yes, except also no: Sixers owner Josh Harris has said he’ll want to keep the mall property’s property tax exemption (projected value: dunno) along with possibly getting state funds. Spending a pile of money and then getting a smaller pile of money back on tax day isn’t “paying the whole cost themselves,” it’s the absolute definition of a tax subsidy.

Opposition to the arena is sometimes contradictory. Economist Andrew Zimbalist told The Inquirer, “Here you are right smack in the middle of downtown, and the arena, it’s dark 220 days?” But this is a worst-case scenario that assumes the arena will never host anything but regular-season Sixers games.

Sure, that’s just simple ma — wait, what? “Dark 220 days” means not-dark 145 days, and NBA teams only have 41 regular-season home games. So Zimbalist was projecting about 100 nights where an arena would be hosting concerts or whatnot, which if anything is likely a bit optimistic considering it would have to compete for events with the Flyers‘ existing arena. Does the Inquirer not require that its op-ed columnists own a calculator?

Sure, this is just an opinion piece, and by a guy whose previous opinions — including it’s bad to indict Donald Trump for falsifying business records to cover up using campaign funds as hush money and teachers should have encouraged kids to keep going to in-person school in the middle of a pandemic — are pretty good evidence that his role on the op-ed page is as a “contrarian,” which is usually best defined as “someone willing to say things so dumb that no one else is saying them.” But still, there’s nothing saying the Inquirer has to give space to these sorts of arguments, certainly not without vetting them to see if their math makes any damn sense: As I have personal experience with, newspaper opinion pages are not hesitant to kill submissions just because they disagree with their conclusions, and “the calendar year has 261 days in it” is a conclusion that should be pretty easy to disagree with.

If you’re wondering why Sammin has decided to turn his wrath on arena opponents this week, it may have something to do with Philly Mayor Jim Kenney’s declaration earlier this month that “while it’s an exciting opportunity, we must understand the impact it may have on the surrounding communities before any plans move forward,” as well as upcoming mayoral primaries in which two of the five leading candidates have come out against the arena on the grounds that its Chinatown would-be neighbors hate it with a fiery passion. None of which means the Sixers arena plan is necessarily faltering — cities do impact studies all the time that end up saying “meh, it won’t be too bad,” and the mayoral race is completely up for grabs and mayors often change their minds about things once elected anyway — but it’s apparently going to get us lots more public firing of rage cannons on the topic, especially in newspapers that employ professional cannoneers.