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Originally Posted by wallflower
My gambling-loving friend always points out that there are always at least 2 times more escalators going down into the casino than coming up. Casinos are designed that way. I think the idea of casinos aren't really designed to improve a city, but to generate revenue (indirect tax).
Article about Temple Professor's book about Atlantic City
The rise and fall of Atlantic City
In Boardwalk of Dreams, Simon maintains that the influx of casinos in Atlantic City in 1978 signaled the end of the city. With a journalist’s eye for detail and a historian’s precision, he documents how the expressway has replaced the Boardwalk as the main thoroughfare in Atlantic City.
“In the 25 years since Resorts [International] opened, the city has lost a third of its population and housing stock,” Simon wrote. “Now there are more casino employees than city residents, and most of these people live in the suburbs.
“The Boardwalk is no longer a magical place. Most Atlantic City visitors don’t really care about the ocean or the Boardwalk, not when there are jackpots to be won and traffic to beat.”
While Atlantic City’s casinos have provided 43,924 jobs and $6 billion in investment, “the gaming industry has not saved Atlantic City,” Simon said. “In many ways, the city as a place to live is now worse than ever.”
The casinos, Simon notes, are designed to keep people inside, not on the city’s streets.
“By setting themselves off from their surroundings, the casinos generated an eerie a-geographic, a-historic feel,” Simon said. “They could just as easily have been plopped down at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport or in downtown Orlando.”
Simon views Boardwalk of Dreams as more than the story of Atlantic City. Other cities, including Philadelphia, which is instituting slot machine gambling, can learn from the seashore resort’s mistakes.
“People make cities — people on the sidewalks, in cafes, in front of movie theaters and in stores,” Simon said.
“This dance of people out in public is what brings life, vigor and energy to cities. Casinos spend a lot of time and money trying to create the opposite effect.” |
Right now with the U.S. able to depend almost entirely on the global economy for all its essential needs, it can afford to dabble in all sorts of reckless behavior domestically with seemingly no bad consequence. But with evergrowing and mounting tensions overseas it's totally questionable how much longer America can keep heading in this direction. Right now our country's relationship to the rest of the world is like this: It's like that 30-something year old still living under his parents' roof just goofing off because he can get away with it. And his parents are all but helpless to throw him out of the house. And living under his parents' roof, he parties with his buddies there constantly, steals what he can from his parents to buy his drugs, and so on and so forth. Nothing he does is to anyone's betterment other than his. The drug dealers, equally uncontributive, like him because he's steady business for them. And his buddies like the place to hang out and goof off that he provides. But could he turn around to do anything worthwhile? Well, yeah, a lot of things, if he were pressed to, or in some instances simply given a chance to. And many things he would actually love to do. But there he is held back, by his own laziness, his buddies and, of course, the neighborhood drug dealers. Still, it just keeps going on and on that way. But it can't do that forever.
In applying that analogy to Philadelphia, to a huge extent Philadelphia stopped being productive years ago, and in terms of newer things coming along it didn't even try to catch the wave of those. For why when the rest of the world can do all those things while Philadelphia just bums around? On several occasions there were major attempts to get Philadelphia on a path of things meaningful, and that the rest of the world could sing its praises of. But then the drug dealers intervened, in some cases literally, in other instances symbolized by our politicians, such as when former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge totally screwed up the Meyer-Werftt deal, which looks to have been quite calculating and deliberately.
And with opportunities such as that having been shrugged off, now comes the gambling.
But with tensions exploding throughout the rest of the world anyone with common sense shoud see it's the worst possible time for it. If I had to make projections I would say that Philadelphia's gambling to come will not be sustainable. It will be like the biggest shipment of heroin of all being delivered to that 30-something still living under his parent's roof. It will be the powerful blast that kills the 30-something off for good, and taking the full house down with him.
While it's important to try to learn from Atlantic City's mistakes, there are major differences between 1978 when gambling became legal there, and 2008, when Philadelphia will be getting its first casinos. Not that it worked out in a good way, but Atlantic City's going the way of casinoization worked because it was the only place at that time here on the east coast that went in that direction. This enabled it to have a very long run ahead of it, however awful. Philadelphia does not have that same scenario to work with, quite the exact opposite. Yet because of gambling's power, or at least the belief in what it can do, it can block anything that has to be done from getting done. And that is where the whole matter is looking very very scary right now. For what can happen on the road ahead is that the casinos can rise up here and it will all be one big PFTTT! The casinos will open up for business but will prove to be totally unsensational. But yet with everything aligned for them to be the big saviour to come. But that doesn't come and won't come. However, rather than this being a point that those now opposed to the casinos will be able to cheer about come then -- if it does play out that way -- because no preparations will have been put in place in case the casinos failed, it will be these big dead casinos and all else that's around them dead as well, because the powers-that-be all assumed "that could never happen."
For in terms of how they're looking at things, keep in mind that while many of us have studied the downside of what happened in Atlantic City and have indeed observed and learned from the mistakes of that, in Atlantic City's case there was an upside, too. At least for some. So in trying to learn anything from Atlantic City, that's all that Governor Rendell and Vince Fumo and others are looking at. They know there were all the downsides. But they're seeing that there was an upside, too. And based upon what they see when they look at Atlantic City they assume that upside will emerge in Philadelphia's case as well. Yet on what basis? Because that's how it was in Atlantic City? For that's where they're not seeing the major difference.
For I put forth this: If Philadelphia, like Atlantic City, becomes a casino town only, but totally unlike how it was for Atlantic City Philadelphia's casinos fail, then we're going to be looking at a city that's wedged in the wrong exit door. And it will be such that it cannot back out to go through the right one. The correct exit door -- a return to true productivity and actual wealth production -- it can go through here and now. That is a fact. But that exit door is being blocked by those convinced the casinos are the right way out. All bets are being placed on that. All bets are being forced to be placed on that, in that Philadelphians were never allowed any real vote on this. Nor are they being given any chance to decide the planning of it. The most they are being granted is just to be able guess at what's to come and to try to plan accordingly, just as I'm doing now. While the ones who think they'll be benefiting -- and maybe some of them will -- aren't guessing, but rather, they're just thinking that they already know. But nobody knows that which they think they know with absolute certainty, nobody. For only a total fool would ignore the fact that there are major differences between Atlantic City in 1978 and Philadelphia as it will be in 2008.
01-04-2007, 04:00 PM
