Gambling continues to fail in Atlantic City
By Josh Dawsey, Wall Street Journal
ATLANTIC CITY — Early Tuesday morning, gamblers at the Revel Casino Hotel will be asked to leave, and security guards will take over at the gleaming, 47-story building on the north end of the boardwalk.
The sudden closing of the two-year-old Revel, plus two other casinos shutting their doors in the next few weeks, marks the end of Atlantic City’s decades-long reliance on gambling to stay afloat.
When Atlantic City opened its first casino in 1978, state and local officials talked up gambling as the path to revival for a shore resort plagued by high unemployment and white flight to the suburbs. While the city had its moments—even surpassing the Las Vegas Strip in gambling revenue for much of the 1980s and 1990s—many politicians, residents and business people are giving up on the dream.
The city is bracing itself for the loss of more than 6,000 jobs at the Revel, Showboat and Trump Plaza, and collateral damage as businesses and the city itself cope with the aftermath. In January, the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, with about 800 rooms, closed.
I spoke at an international gaming conference in 1985 in Atlantic City. I went for a walk in the evening rather than hang out in the casino. I walked about a block away from the casinos and found absolute blight and evidence of extreme poverty. Even during their best times, the promised improvements for the community never materialized. The short-term thinking and behavior cannot sustain itself. We see the same happening in our entire country now. All the money goes to a tiny portion of the population, who then are allowed to buy their way to more exploitation to the detriment to the country. It is so sad. Please vote for the sake of the United States of America. The paradigm must shift back to country-centric, and away from business-centric, IMHO, for us to survive as a nation.
I thought building for and catering to the elite high end market always worked.
Ever walk a little ways away from the casino core of Reno? Las Vegas? Same thing. Scary blight. Cheap liquor stores and check cashing businesses. I’m not anti-casino. But pretending that they benefit anyone but the corporations who own them is ridiculous.
As far as ‘catering to the elite high end’, America’s casinos don’t do that. Look at the people who frequent them. It ain’t the 1%. They’re not rich because they throw their money away in gambling halls. They OWN the gambling halls and collect the money that stupid people spend in them.