When former Ontario finance minister Dwight Duncan introduced the idea of putting a mega-casino, aka an “integrated casino resort,” in Toronto, he boldly stated that a casino at Ontario Place would be “an anchor that could create a golden mile on Toronto’s waterfront.”
This kind of assertion is most often made about cities in deep economic trouble that are desperately looking for something, anything, to spur economic development. In return for a promised “infusion” of life and vitality, they are sometimes persuaded to give up valuable public land, often on waterfronts.
But is the pitch true? What actually happens in the vicinity of these urban casinos? Evidence suggests it’s not good.
The once great seaside destination of Atlantic City, with its grand boardwalk, bet the farm on a bevy of enormous casinos and the prosperity they would bring. The result has been a decimated downtown core and a deteriorating, depressed city surrounding walled casinos and their parking lots. Financial support from state and local authorities is now needed to rescue these derelict areas. In fact the latest and largest of these, Revel, which bills itself as an integrated casino resort and most closely resembles what is proposed for Toronto, has just declared bankruptcy.
In St. Louis, the casino adjacent to the famous Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park has produced a wasteland, as has its gambling companion on the opposite river bank in East St. Louis.
Detroit and its three casinos, plus their Canadian cousin on the Windsor Detroit River waterfront all exhibit the same familiar pattern. In Halifax, the casino’s darkened windows and narrow, empty walkway on the harbour next to Purdy’s Landing again prove the point.
The picture that emerges is consistent: zones of vacancy and sterility.
In Addiction By Design (2012), author Natasha Dow Schüll gives a detailed account of video gaming addiction, focusing on video terminal design. She writes that the vast majority of people at Gamblers Anonymous meetings are addicted to these machines, not to table games or lotteries. (By 2003, it was estimated that 85 per cent of betting industry profits in the U.S. came from video gaming.)
Problem gamblers are attracted to the machines not just by of the lure of a big win, but because they provide an escape from everyday life.
Schüll describes the progression of changes the industry has introduced to foster this phenomenon: removing distractions, speeding up the rate of play, tweaking the programs to keep the dopamine flowing.
It’s the detachment from outside reality that is critical. The same can be said of casinos themselves and the complexes that house them.
While high-profile urban sites are appealing to casino operators for their visibility, owners have next to no desire for any connection with the cities outside their compounds.
Once gambling clients arrive, the aim is to keep players inside and focused. The last thing promoters and their government partners want is have patrons spending their money outside.
The reach of the casino complex thus keeps expanding. The number of slots increases and the gambling space is “integrated” with other uses like an internal shopping mall, entertainment venues, hotels and restaurants, bars and clubs, all absorbed into a large internalized vortex.
Size does matter: this kind of all-encompassing complex exerts a vacuum effect on surrounding businesses.
The version proposed for Toronto calls for 5,000 slots in an area the equivalent of seven and a half football fields (10 acres) and a million-square-foot mall requiring around 11,000 parking spaces.
Picture that aircraft-carrier-sized behemoth docking in any of the proposed locations – the port lands, Front and John or Exhibition Place – with its attendant traffic!
Imagine this with the Gardiner out of service for a number of years while unavoidable demolition and/or reconstruction takes place.
It’s not surprising that the real city builders around all of the proposed sites – developers, community associations and business owners – are stepping up to advise City Hall that a downtown casino would seriously jeopardize mixed use projects combining office, retail and residential spaces.
For a city with a strong, healthy and diverse local economy like Toronto to squander valuable land on such a bad bet would be a tragic mistake.
Update (3/1/2013, 3:01 pm): Kelly Gawlik of New York-based PR firm Weber Shandwick says Revel has yet to officially declare bankruptcy and that the casino “plans to recapitalize through consensual prepackaged Chapter 11 reorganization.”
Ken Greenberg is an architect, urban designer, teacher, writer, former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto and Principal of Greenberg Consultants.
