A looming casino war, with casualties likely
Laura Nahmias and Ryan Hutchins
For most of its life as a casino town, Atlantic City was a safe bet. The people who made the city’s skyline glow and roulette wheels spin watched the money pile up as their regional monopoly boomed. By 2006, the casinos were making more than $5 billion per year.
Then the crowds, and profits, thinned, as newer, more conveniently located gambling halls offered competition. The money went to Queens and Yonkers, to the seven casinos along the eastern edge of Pennsylvania, and to Delaware and Maryland.
“That’s basically what I consider the regional mid-Atlantic market. If you add all that up, it’s about a $6 billion annual gaming market,” said Izzy Posner, a professor Richard Stockton College near Atlantic City and leading expert on the regional gaming industry. “If Atlantic City still had a monopoly, we probably would have had all of that $6 billion.”
Now, New York state is hoping to siphon even more of that money, with four new upstate casinos that look to draw visitors back from Pennsylvania and Connecticut and into New York towns where the unemployment rate is high as 13 percent.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/albany/2014/07/8549719/looming-casino-war-casualties-likely?top-featured-3
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