moocow007 wrote:So what exactly is the deal? Philly doesn't want the Sixers there? Or the Sixers trying to get "incentives" to build a new arena and that's what the city is coming up short at? I would imagine that the owners don't really want to move all things equal.
The short answer is the team is planning on going from being a renter in someone else's stadium to a home owner of their own stadium.
Currently all of Philly's stadiums are in south Philadelphia in basically a stadium zone, with nothing else there (old shipping etc). The area has solid mass transport (at least in terms of how Philly does it) with a straight line up the north south central artery to the city that then connects to all the east west and massive amounts of parking as you can do in an area with nothing.
But in essence, this is more akin to a stadium along the PATH than in downtown manhattan like where MSG is. Sixers owners don't just want to own a building, they want prime real estate and there happens to be prime central real estate that is 'somewhat' available because the idea of having big department stores and similar in the center of a city isn't a thing anymore. So the owners have a site all picked out, and a proposed building plan even.
Normally this is when the team further shakes down a city, but here the story is really that the site picked has a couple of issues, so the shakedown is just whether the site gets approved. The main issues are:
-- It is in the middle of the city which means finding room for all the parking/traffic from the suburban folks that don't mass transport into the city will be a royal pain. Picture people getting to MSG without a good transit system from the burbs, and make the roads smaller while you are at it, less parking etc.
-- It is on the edge/in Chinatown, which means that a historic area of the city would be very likely to have its fabric forever altered in a way that many find unacceptable.
As for NJ, Camden is doing a ton to try and make it like hopping over to Brooklyn from Manhattan and really reinvent itself. As a general rule massive state subsidies to billionaire sports owners is just bad business, but here really is a decent argument that it could help turn the area into more of a destination and spark a full change.
Course, if you live downtown and could suddenly walk to a stadium and aren't worried/concerned about the Chinatown impact, the owners stadium sounds pretty awesome instead of NJ.
{Also, the current stadium has tried to claim that they won't make money if the Sixers leave. Both with losing the Sixers and also not being the best concert and event venue compared to the new to be built stadium in a better location. Which shouldn't really matter to anyone else, but they are trying...}