Because the Sixers owners want to make more money and not be Comcast's tenant and the Philly political/labor machine wants to build another arena.
And yeah it does appear to be pretty close to done with Squilla seemingly doing nothing to stop it. It's odd to me that Comcast didn't have more political juice.
In addition to all you mentioned Philly just doesn't need two arenas the other 320 nights a year, even if we do get a WNBA team.
We'll see, history says these things are often stopped but the city council doesn't seem too dug in against it.
The public transportation infrastructure is already there but A) it won't stop people from driving B) it's the same infrastructure that merely requires an extra 10 minutes on the express train to get to Broad and Pattison.
Neil DeMause is always the best guy on this topic, though this is paywalled
He actually says the deal could be a whole lot worse, but it could also be a whole lot better. And:
It’s one of the oddities seen in sports venue developments across numerous cities: While studies have found that what they can do for neighborhoods is invariably overblown, what they can do to neighborhoods—by attracting the attention of the concentrated wealth ready to anoint a new up-and-coming district as ripe for fresh settlers—is often all too real.
The arguments in favor of the arena, meanwhile, have been straight out of the standard sports venue playbook. The Sixers owners contracted with Convention, Sports & Leisure, a consultant with a long track record of innacurate and misleading estimates, whose parent company Legends is owned by the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys. Legends submitted a report claiming that a new downtown arena would generate $22 million a year in new tax revenue, something that earned such reviews as “concocted PR document” (Kennesaw State University economist J.C. Bradbury) and “completely useless” (Propheter).
