Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Casinos in Buffalo, update:

The Seneca Nation of Indians recently made a decision about where they were going to put their second casino in Western New York. They're going to build it in Cheektowaga, which is one of Buffalo's biggest suburbs (and second to Amherst in terms of economic power). Cheektowaga happens to be where the Buffalo Niagara Internation Airport is located, and if the reports are correct, the casino will be built a few miles right down the road from the airport itself. Residents in that area, of course, are not entirely thrilled, mainly because the Genesee Street/Transit Road corridor happens to be a very heavily traveled road in these parts already, and would presumably become even moreso if a casino were in the offing.

Now, I'm not wild about casinos in general, because I don't think they generate much economic activity beyond the actual jobs within the casino itself. I refuse to believe that a casino will spark the building of a whole bunch of restaurants and whatnot nearby, since casinos are specifically designed to lure people indoors and keep them there. That's why they never have windows and why you have to negotiate a maze between entering the front doors and actually coming out onto the gaming floor. And in the case of the Seneca casinos, the vastly greater portion of the profits will go to the Senecas themselves, so it's not like this is some great tax-revenue cash cow. The state and the county get a small cut, but that's about it.

However, casinos are a done deal, pretty much. They're coming, and the powers-that-be around here wanted to put on in downtown Buffalo, which struck me as a terrible idea. Doing so would not spur new development downtown, and even worse, it would take a building or set of buildings off the city's tax rolls entirely, which is not what you need in a city where the budget gaps are a constant scene of disaster.

Besides, Buffalo News columnist Donn Esmonde recently made an interesting point: putting the casino near the airport might strengthen the need for a new mass-transit connection between downtown and the airport area, perhaps even by adding a new Metro-rail line. Metrorail is Buffalo's subway/light-rail system, which runs along Main Street only and stops right at the city limits, as opposed to logically going into Amherst and all the way to UB's North Campus. (This is due to resistance by Amherst, Buffalo's richest suburb. I suspect they don't want to make it too easy for them downtown criminal-types to come out to their fair city. A great example of regional thinking, that.)

If we gotta have this thing in our neighborhood, Cheektowaga makes a lot more sense than downtown Buffalo. And who knows, maybe when they build it I'll get a job dealing cards there.