Word: casino
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...uncollected in the streets. Businesses fled. Today half the 40,000 residents, in a town that used to be integrated but is now 98% black, qualify for public assistance. Drugs are rampant. Where better than this slum on the Mississippi River to build a glittering $45 million floating casino...
...question is not ironic. For if most investors would hesitate to bet on a basket case, the five businessmen who launched the Casino Queen in June 1993 recouped their money in six months--and have been raking in profits ever since. Meanwhile, taxes on the riverboat's $150 million annual revenues have doubled the city's budget to $12 million, allowing East St. Louis to reduce property levies 30%, slash its debt, double the number of police officers and patrol cars, and thus cut the murder rate by a third. The boat, with 1,250 workers, is now the city...
...cities that benefit most from casinos are those that can attract enough out-of-towners so that the regressive losses, and attendant social problems, fall less heavily on their own citizens. In Las Vegas, Southern California tourists bear the burden, while the riverboat in Council Bluffs, Iowa, lives off bettors from Omaha, Nebraska. And although most Illinois casinos attract few out-of-staters, East St. Louis is an exception. On two recent nights some 70% of the Casino Queen's patrons were white, many of them from across the river in Missouri. "Casino gambling is a shell game," explains Earl...
That helps explain why the casinos' record on spurring nongambling economic growth is so spotty. Local restaurants are often squeezed out by cheap in-house casino eateries. Atlantic City, New Jersey, lost about a third of its retail businesses after casinos moved in and former customers gambled away their discretionary dollars. In South Dakota, when slot machines were legalized to revive the Black Hills resort of Deadwood, the three car dealerships, the hardware store, the clothing shop and the local Taco Bell all converted into mini-casinos--a more lucrative business, gutting the town's retail base...
East St. Louis had less to lose. Still, the rising tide of riverboat revenues has not lifted all boats. The Casino Queen parking lot is surrounded by a high-security fence with guards in two watchtowers and on the ground. A new stop on the MetroLink commuter train, which deposits visitors at the boat, was designed to bypass the heart of East St. Louis, which even now has large tracts of urban desolation and 1,700 abandoned buildings.. "You have not seen a lot of gambling revenue trickle into the neighborhood," says community activist Alandra Byrd. But the casino...