Casinos

I spent some of my daydreaming time at The Store today fulminating a post about casinos in Buffalo, since the Seneca Nation of Indians announced the other day that they're picking their site for their third Western New York casino, which will presumably be in downtown Buffalo. I had all of my arguments ready to go, and then I get home and find that Alan has already posted them. So ditto what he says: I don't like the idea of taking property off the tax rolls in a city whose tax base is already in a state of deep erosion; I don't believe there will be much economic spin-off effect; I believe that too many dollars from the casino, aside from the wages for the bartenders and the coat-checkers and the blackjack dealers, will end up in Seneca Nation pockets and not Buffalo pockets. I'm not wild about a downtown casino, but if we're to have this thing rammed down our throats -- and apparently we are -- then it had damned well better not be on the waterfront. That's the last place where we need a big-ass windowless box of a building.

I also don't think that casinos will do much to generate new tourism here. Everybody and their brother has casinos nowadays, and I'm hard-pressed to think of a place east of the Mississippi where one isn't within six hours of some form of casino gaming. Nobody's going to come to Buffalo because the Senecas build a casino here; our new casino will primarily be a draw for people already here.

TIME Magazine ran a two-story feature on the underside of the Indian casino industry a few years back, with part one here and part two here. It's a pretty creepy business, in my view, and I'd really rather not have my struggling city put this group in any kind of economic driver's seat.