Project Katrina

This story from the Washington Post reminds me of the first time I visited Atlantic City. Just a few blocks from all the billion dollar casinos are neighborhoods that appear ripped from a third world country. I have to believe that when elected leaders pushed for tax breaks and rezoning the citizens were told the casinos would bring high-paying jobs and taxes to help improve the city. Well I don’t know how anybody can drive around Atlantic City and believe any of those promises were kept.

Nowhere has the rebound from Hurricane Katrina been gaudier than along Mississippi’s casino-studded coast.

Even as the storm’s debris was being cleared, this city’s night skies were lighted up with the high-wattage brilliance of the Imperial Palace, then the Isle of Capri, then the Grand Casino. More followed, and so did vacation-condo developers.
   
Yet in the wrecked and darkened working-class neighborhoods just blocks from the waterfront glitter, those lights cast their colorful glare over an apocalyptic vision of empty lots and scattered trailers that is as forlorn as anywhere in Katrina’s strike zone.

"At night, you can see the casino lights up in the sky," Shirley Salik, 72, a former housekeeper at one of the casinos, said this month while standing outside her FEMA camper with her two dogs. "But that’s another world."

More than two years after the storm, the highly touted recovery of the Mississippi coast remains a starkly divided phenomenon.

[...]

While Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has hailed the casino openings as a harbinger of Mississippi’s resurgence and developers have proposed more than $1 billion in beachfront condos and hotels for tourists, fewer than one in 10 of the thousands of single-family houses destroyed in Biloxi are being rebuilt, according to city permit records. More than 10,000 displaced families still live in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

I wonder how much longer American citizens are going to fall for the false logic that casinos are good for the local economy. They are not. How many more examples are required.

Disclaimer: I should note this is a "hot button" issue for me. There is a huge casino being built across the river from me in St. Louis. For decades we’ve be told that efforts would be made to rebuild the riverfront area to no avail. But heck, we’ll have a casino pretty soon. I just burn with rage when people from the casino are on the local NPR station arguing they can’t met the contractual obligations to hire a certain percentage of minority owned businesses, get this, cause there aren’t any in the St. Louis area that can perform the work.