The Racist Real Estate Networks of the 76ers Arena Developers, from West Philadelphia to Palestine
Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. — Ruth Wilson Gilmore
When thousands of Chinatown families and allies protest, “Our City Is Not For Sale,” their opposition to the new 76ers stadium deal strikes at the heart of a sports industrial complex that threatens every Philadelphian — but Asian, Black, and Brown communities most of all. Over the past year, the people have spoken: Mayor Cherelle Parker and City Council have chosen to ignore the 69% of the city that opposes the arena being built in Chinatown. Still, many might not be aware of the global nexus of sports financing, real estate, and racism that undergirds the dirty business of the billionaire owners of the 76ers. A closer look at the resumés of the three key players — Josh Harris, David Blitzer, David Adelman — reveals a disturbing pattern of land grabs and displacement of poor communities from West Philadelphia to Palestine.
The Three-Headed Hydra of Sports and Real Estate Financiers
Billionaires Harris and Blitzer, the current owners of the 76ers and several other major sports franchises, founded Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment (HBSE) in 2017. They first purchased the Philly team back in 2011 for $280 million, and since then their sports venture has mushroomed into a major enterprise, with HBSE alone valued at $11.86 billion in 2024.
HBSE’s ownership view of the 76ers as a growth-driven financial asset helps explain their push for a new stadium. The team currently resides at Wells Fargo Center, a stadium owned by Comcast Spectacor, the franchise’s former owners, which runs the concessions and collects rent from the team. The proposed Chinatown arena would, however, be owned — not leased — by HBSE and thus swell the value of the team. It would also open up development opportunities in the area surrounding the stadium by wiping out many local Chinatown businesses, something not lost on HBSE partners who formed Sports Entertainment and Real Estate Global Holdings (SEREGH) with the mission of “investing in and developing real estate around sports and entertainment venues.” The takeover of entire neighborhoods by stadium profiteers has happened before and in other cities. Indeed, 76ers Place is not the only arena HBSE is working to have built: in 2023 they bought the Washington Commanders football team and are now trying to overcome community opposition to a new stadium in Washington DC as well.
Each financier has his own seedy story and unsavory business associates that connects big money to community displacement, near and far.
JOSH HARRIS
Josh Harris, co-founder of Apollo Global Management–known for being a particularly predatory investment firm–has a surprising footprint in Philadelphia land struggles. In 2020 he had a hand in “revitalizing” (demolishing and displacing) the “blighted” historic and black Sharswood-Ridge community in North Philadelphia as co-investor in the neighborhood redevelopment through his family firm HRS Management. Together with Mosaic Development Partners, Shift Capital, and the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), Sharswood was revamped, and afterward, Harris bought a $10 million stake in Mosaic Joint Ventures. It is no coincidence that Mosaic, a “Minority Certified commercial real estate development company founded in 2008,” is a current partner in the 76ers stadium project; but no amount of diversity or minority washing can cleanse the discriminatory bottomline of poor people’s displacement.
While Sharswood was touted by the city as a shining example of revitalization in collaboration with a black-led development company, its gentrification — the construction of ‘affordable’ (middle-class) housing, a parking garage, and retail space — was executed on the backs of protestors fighting housing insecurity. As we will see, these same players who develop sports facilities have been undoing the work of those on the ground who struggle for housing justice. After the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, a houseless protest encampment sprung up on the Benjamin Franklin parkway; the protest primarily targeted PHA, demanding the transfer of vacant former units of public housing be transferred to a community land trust. A second encampment soon appeared on the empty block across from the PHA headquarters at Ridge and Jefferson in North Philadelphia. This occupation posed a problem for the imminent Sharswood development planned by the PHA, which had already used eminent domain there to dispossess 1300 black homeowners of their homes in 2015 and, it turned out, had secured $52 million in financing for the site. Protest leader Jennifer Bennetch of OccupyPHA ultimately led the resolution of the encampment on Benjamin Franklin Parkway by negotiating a deal with the City and PHA for rehabbed properties and amnesty for squatters involved in the protest, with the city announcing a number of concessions the organizers hadn’t asked for, including a controversial ‘tiny homes’ village. The company that won the City RFP bid for a tiny home village the next year was none other than… Mosaic. Harris and Mosaic, partners-in-gentrification, are now making their move on Chinatown.
While displacing poor black communities in Philly, Harris and the other developers involved in the 76ers arena also have business interests in Israel, a nation currently undertaking the genocide and forced displacement of Palestinians. In a disturbing enactment of sports philanthropy, Harris’ investments in Israel include leveraging the 76ers name. The Harris family foundation finances a youth sports program in Israel named the 48ers, which employs the logo of his NBA team. 1948 refers to the year that Israel declared itself a state and what Palestinian refer to as the Nakba, or ‘tragedy’ of the forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands. As Harris puts it, the name “is a takeoff on the 76ers [and the founding of the United States in 1776], but it’s also the year that Israel was founded.” Harris says that the program, which “initially began as a program for Ethiopian Jews,” now serves “people that are less fortunate and aren’t necessarily ready to serve in the military.” The basketball league provides Israeli boys and girls the means to ready themselves for service in the Israel Defense Forces, essentially serving as a military pipeline. How many 76er basketball players realize or condone the use of their team for empowering future IDF soldiers, the same soldiers who are committing unspeakable atrocities against Palestinian families and children? Is this really what Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, should lend our name and tax dollars to support?
DAVID BLITZER
Why would Mayor Cherelle Parker and Philadelphia city officials want to hand the keys of the city over to a man whose investment management company is an enemy of affordable housing worldwide?
It is no secret that David Blitzer has spent his entire career at Blackstone, the largest alternative asset management firm in the world, with over one trillion dollars under management. As a senior executive and the global head of Blackstone’s Tactical Opportunities Group, Blitzer helps run a company that describes itself as “the biggest opportunistic investment platform in the world.” Blackstone is, among other things, the world’s largest corporate landlord, denounced by the United Nations in 2019 for fueling the global housing crisis and “devastating” the human rights of tenants in numerous countries.
To take the case of Spain, where Blackstone is the country’s biggest real estate investor and has a portfolio of over 20,000 residential homes and numerous tourist hotels, Blitzer’s company has helped evict hundreds of thousands of people over the last decade. Like arenas, hotel developments directly impact an unsustainable increase in rents, closure of local businesses, congestion and pollution of high-traffic areas, and displacement of residents from their neighborhoods. In 2022, fair housing organizers in Barcelona and Madrid protested, “Our lives are not market goods — we deserve to live in decent homes. We demand all evictions be stopped. We demand Blackstone offer fair rents to all those families who have built a home for years and now have to flee due to the abuse and harassment they have suffered.”
We need look no further than West Philadelphia to see how the debacle of private equity plays out in our neighborhoods and the lucrative student housing market. Anyone who walks down Market or Chestnut can see the astounding growth of high rises run by corporate landlords that largely serve university student renters. The town has become the gown. Blackstone’s historic 2022 purchase of American Campus Communities for $13 billion brought an end to all publicly traded student housing investment firms nationally. Before his exit from Drexel University, John Fry, now President of Temple University, publicly boasted about the luxury student housing partnership with ACC, calling it a “very big step forward” in turning the 30th Street Station area, rebranded as Schuylkill Yards, into an “Innovation Neighborhood” to serve the university’s interests. Whether through building tourist hotels or upscale student housing, the Blackstone playbook is the same the world over: push out communities of color in the name of progress: “The average Blackstone-owned property is in a neighborhood where people of color make up 58% of the residents.”
Why should Philly basketball fans be forced to wed our love of the sport with the fortunes of billionaires committed to the racist destruction of a beloved part of our city, the Chinatown community? Since going into business with Harris and buying the 76ers, Blitzer has gone on a sports franchise buying spree, earning him the distinction of being the first person to ever hold equity in teams across all five major American sports leagues, as well as several European franchises. Interviewed by Bloomberg about his interest in sports investing, Blitzer made clear his view that ownership of sports teams was like investing in any other asset, that for him, sports team valuation primarily revolves around controlling media rights and content generation. In other words, he is different from the typical wealthy-elite team owners often thought of as being primarily motivated by eccentricity, vanity or prestige: his outlook is ruthlessly financial and land grabbing.
DAVID ADELMAN
The third head of the 76ers hydra, David Adelman, is an HBSE limited partner who invested with Harris in not only the 76ers but also the British Premier League football team, Crystal Palace. As CEO of Campus Apartments, Adelman owns over 100 apartments in West Philadelphia. Adelman’s Campus Apartments also turns up in Mosaic’s portfolio, and the two have collaborated on another campus housing project in Maryland. Under Adelman Campus Apartments has grown to be the largest privately owned off-campus student housing company in the United States, owing largely to his close partnership with UPenn. Universities, we know, are far from innocent educational institutions. The University of Pennsylvania is Philadelphia’s largest private landowner, yet it pays no property tax due to its nominal non-profit status.
And, like his colleague David Blitzer, David Adelman has investments in Israel. He was the co-chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia (JFGP) in 2020–21 and remains active in the organization, which boasts a decades long relationship with the city Netivot and the Sdot Negev region. These are settler communities immediately adjacent to Gaza in the so-called “Gaza Envelope,” variously targeted by Hamas rocket attacks as well as Israel’s own “Hannibal Directive,” on and after October 7, 2023. JFGP awards grants to projects in Israel on an annual basis, including to the Israeli military as well as settlements in the West Bank that are illegal under international law. Since October 7th, the Federation has been very active in fundraising, raising over $14 million within two months alone for communities in Israel as well as the IDF, and coordinating support rallies in the Philadelphia area.
As a founder and board member of the revitalization consortium University City District (UCD), Adelman has helped steer the neighborhood transformation of West Philadelphia for decades by levying a special tax on businesses there. The motto of UCD was “Change Places and Change Lives”: whose places, whose lives, we ask? Once again, the legacy of the 76ers financial backers is a story of low-income housing demolitions, past and ongoing. Beyond Chinatown, Philadelphia’s ‘experiments’ in urban renewal loop back into the current stadium fight in ways that have been largely overlooked. While the 76ers have recruited a number of black business owners to lobby for the construction of the arena, in reality the real estate investments of their fraternity of sports magnates have harmed black fans and residents alike.
What is now being promoted as a revival of Center City is only the latest in a history of racist urban renewal policies stretching back to the 1950s. Adelman’s Campus Apartments, founded by his mentor Alan Horwitz in 1958, is a product of the land expropriations that benefited UPenn and Drexel and rebranded the area into what we now call University City. It was demolitions of the West Philadelphia black neighborhood known as the Black Bottom that paved the way for construction of Campus Apartments (CA) in the first place, and then further edging out of black families that helped university-adjacent developers like Adelman to co-found UCD in 1997, the same year he became CEO of CA. He went on to sit on the Property Management Advisory Board for Drexel along with developer Brett Altman, manager of below-market properties for Penn’s Neighborhood Preservation Development Fund and the landlord-owner who recently demolished the federally-subsidized, Section 8 University City Townhomes and displaced 70 black and low-income families after their two-year fight to Save the People’s Townhomes.
When Drexel University student protestors conducted a 35-day sit-in beginning in February 2023 calling on John Fry to preserve the UC Townhomes as 100% affordable low-income housing, they also asked that David Adelman and Brett Altman be removed from Drexel’s Real Estate Advisory Council for their role in making West Philadelphia unaffordable for black and working families. Prior to that, in September 2022, Penn students held a 39-day encampment that called for divestment from fossil fuels and the preservation of the UC Townhomes. Save Chinatown residents and organizers took part in this West Philly housing movement because they saw the struggles as interlinked: the same handful of networked developers encroach on each neighborhood.
After tapping David Adelman to front 76DevCorp and announcing their bid to build a new 76ers arena in the heart of Philadelphia, HBSE faced immediate and ongoing pushback from neighboring Chinatown residents and other area community groups in Market East. The stadium project became a central issue in Philadelphia’s 2023 mayoral race, with HBSE mobilizing support of the powerful building trades council, whose business manager Ryan Boyer has hailed Adelman “a genius, an innovator.” These are the same forces who got Mayor Cherelle Parker into office (Boyer also served on her transition team), and she has rewarded them by backing their efforts to push aside low-income communities of color across the city in the name of middle and upper-class development. For this, she has received support from the governor of Pennsylvania as well. In 2024 when the fabricated story was leaked to the press that the 76ers were considering an offer from Camden to relocate to New Jersey, Governor Shapiro was quick to make comments ensuring fans that he would keep the team in Pennsylvania and that he had full trust in Mayor Parker.
When the Billionaire Developers Team up with Politicians to Target Pro-Palestinian Student Protestors
Connecting the dots between developers‘ projects offers a glimpse of the dense network of collaboration between capital firms, city and university boards, and sports teams that underwrites the lobbying force behind the 76ers stadium proposal. While professing to do good, the multi-headed billionaire hydra preys on marginalized communities as well as university students who dare to criticize their investments and political ideologies. All three front men of the 76ers are University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School alums with predatory ventures and a record of killing communities in the name of profit. Harris is a former university trustee, and Blitzer and Harris sit on the Wharton Board along with Marc Rowan, current CEO of Apollo Management, the same firm founded by Harris. Like his 76ers colleagues, Rowan has a direct philanthropic footprint in Israel in the form of the Youth Renewal Fund / Darca Schools Network, the goal of which is to uplift under-served communities in Israel’s periphery by strengthening the local education system. It is not happenstance that these men’s fiscal investments — and disinvestments — in educational systems at home and abroad form part of an attempt to dictate who deserves to live and speak and learn freely. As we know, Rowan’s fanatical campaign to rid Penn of “well known anti-Semites” and stifle protest on campus led to the resignations of Penn President Magill and Board of Trustees Scott Bok. It is no coincidence that the very students who have fought to save affordable housing in West Philadelphia and Chinatown have also been doxxed, disciplined, and harassed for their support of Palestine. The repression of student protest against the state of Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians reached new extremes when thirteen police in full tactical gear, including a city of Philadelphia police officer, recently raided the off-campus house of UPenn student organizers as part of an university police investigation into paint splashed onto a campus statue.
Such violent, McCarthyist measures receive city and even state support. A protest and solidarity march in December 2023 in support of Palestine–which terminated near UPenn at the UC Townhomes — at one stop targeted restaurateur Michael Solomonov’s “Goldie” for his company CookNSolo’s fundraisers for the Israeli Defense Forces. Ex-officio Penn Trustee, and Governor Josh Shapiro instantly condemned the protest as “a blatant act of antisemitism.” When Palestinian solidarity encampments swept US campuses the following spring, Shapiro, who had himself served on an Israeli military base as a teenager and whose first job out of college was working for the Israeli embassy in public relations, would ultimately call for the violent removal of the encampment at UPenn in what was widely seen as part of a nationally coordinated enforcement action. Shapiro has unleashed his pro-Israel stance not only against students but against colleagues running for office in his own party. In the recent election, he snubbed the Democratic nominee for State Treasurer after she declared she would not invest the PA Treasury in Israel Bonds, unlike her Republican opponent.
The connections between city, state, national, and international politics and policies must be understood and addressed for what they are: a sports-real estate alliance against marginalized communities here and in Palestine. The point in making these connections is also to clarify that disparate grassroots movements are often fighting against the exact same people and networks. Even a cursory glance at a subset of the trustee and donor class operating in Philadelphia reveals that billionaires who are simultaneously running asset management firms controlling trillions of dollars globally back local politicians who will push through their unpopular real estate developments. Some fund the minority owned businesses that will build projects for them. Others overthrow Ivy League university presidents, raise money for the Congresspeople who help them do it, and target young people protesting them with the support of the governor. And all have a philanthropic footprint in Israel to prepare young people to serve in the military or defend its boundaries.
The parallels between an openly colonial ethno-state settlement project like Israel, that is prepared to carry out a live-streamed genocide to achieve its territorial expansion, and what various communities of color experience most often as displacement through market-led gentrification, are not coincidental or indeed purely ideological. Indeed, the struggles for self-determination in these communities actually mirror the Palestinian resistance in Israel. And the connections are material. The history of exchange and mutual development of surveillance, policing, incarceration and counter-insurgency between the two governments is profound and ongoing. The history of the US as a settler-colony that carried out multiple genocides in its formation should not be seen as complete. The Nakba is ongoing, as is the resistance …
…from West Philly to Chinatown to Palestine, displacement is a crime.
