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Sure, the soccer stadium will revive Chester, just as soon as stadiums can magically clean toxic brownfields
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Sure, the soccer stadium will revive Chester, just as soon as stadiums can magically clean toxic brownfields
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Who wouldn't envy the kind of press the Daily News and Inquirer have been giving the owners, builders, and supporters of Chester's new soccer stadium, which will house the Philadelphia Union?
The stadium hosted its first game this weekend, amid news that the city of Chester – a largely poor, post-industrial city which famously lacks a single supermarket – is under a state of emergency following a spate of homicides.
It seems the two newspapers just can't stop posing the question: Might the new stadium finally revive Chester?
The answer is: not likely – and not just because stadiums almost never justify the large public subsidies they often wrangle from the hands of our elected officials, as Temple professor Kevin J. Delaney and Villanova professor and Rick Eckstein point out in their book, Public Dollars, Private Stadiums.
But also because the stadium's funding was secured largely by promises of further economic development – a so-called "master plan development that would include commercial, business, and residential units – that had little to no basis in reality, as I reported in my 2009 investigative piece, Steamrolled:
Though the vast majority of the benefits the Chester development is supposed to bring are associated with the mixed-use parcel, virtually all the public money allocated to the project is going straight to the construction of the stadium.
The state agencies awarding the millions appear, in some cases, to have failed or declined to ask basic questions about the economic benefits being promised.
Contamination on the site where the mixed-use development is to be built raises questions about whether delivering the promised amenities is even economically feasible.
And the very developers expected to build the mixed-use site — the principals of the Wilmington-based Buccini/Pollin Group (BPG) — are part-owners of the soccer team, providing a potential disincentive for them to allocate any of the public money toward anything but the stadium, from which they hope to profit.Will The Team deliver on its promises? Or has the public — the city of Chester, in particular — been duped?
A year later, the answer appears to be: yes. Chester still has no supermarket. And, as this paper found likely a year ago, the stadium is complete without any work – or any signs of it – taking place on the "master plan," which was supposed to have provided the most jobs and economic benefits to Chester.
Investigator Isaac, why not build a supermarket yourself?
Why does the first line of pieces written by Isaiah Thompson always run vertically (and illegibly) down the right side of the accompanying image? Is it just my browser?
[...] Thompson of Philadelphia’s CityPaper wonders why PPL Park is up and running while Chester hasn’t received any of the public money for economic [...]
[...] of the controversies surrounding the stadium built in neighboring Chester is that there were numerous promises made by [...]
My company worked on this project for 8 months. we were practically the last sub on the job & the last to get paid. we are still owed for work completed in June, July, August, September & November & have not received payment. We need teeth to get our money Please Help
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