There is a Caesars Palace casino right in the middle of Times Square. A huge gambling hall on the famous pier at Coney Island. A Hard Rock casino building right next to Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.
Eight projects are competing for a state license to open a casino in New York City, which is a very profitable market. Each one is offering the chance for long-term investment in the country’s biggest city.
But one may already be dead in the water: a Bally’s casino planned for a golf club in the Bronx that was once owned by President Trump’s company. This week, city lawmakers turned down a key approval for the casino.
In the recent application materials that were sent in, all of the proposed casinos promise to bring thousands of new jobs to the area, as well as fancy new hotels, shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. They will also bring in billions of dollars a year in taxable gambling taxes for the state.
But it’s not clear how realistic those claims are, since there are so many casinos in the northeast and online gambling has grown so quickly in recent years, say casino experts.
Gambling industry spending big, but some locals aren’t sold
It has been years in the making for full-fledged gambling resorts to open in New York City.
In 2013, the gaming industry spent a lot of money to get New York voters to approve a referendum that let up to seven full casinos with live table games open. But at first, the state let places in upstate get a head start.
The gaming commission for the state says it plans to finally give out up to three licenses in the downstate in December. But first, lawmakers and local officials will put together community advisory groups that will look at each plan and see what the people who live there think about it.
Almost all of the gambling plans are met with some level of opposition in the area.
The New York City Council turned down Bally’s request for a necessary rezoning change on Monday because of concerns from locals about the $4 billion plan’s environmental effect. The plan includes a 500-room hotel and a 2,000-seat event center.
When Bally’s bought the old Trump Links course in 2023, it offered to pay Trump an extra $115 million if it got a casino license. However, neither the Democratic majority on the council nor the Republican lawmaker for the Bronx district spoke out against this. Bally’s spokespeople wouldn’t say anything about the project’s future this week.
As expected, the debate over the planned casino in Times Square has become the main topic of conversation. Recently, supporters and opponents of the casino held opposing rallies in the Crossroads of the World.
The Broadway League, a trade group for America’s performing arts companies, is one of the most well-known groups that is against the $5.4 billion plan. It claims that a casino would take customers away from nearby companies and pose a threat to the theater industry, which is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Supporters of the project say that the plan to renovate a skyscraper that is currently home to the Minskoff Theatre, which is where the long-running show “The Lion King” is performed, will actually make more people want to buy Broadway tickets.
The builders have also hired Jay-Z’s Roc Nation to plan the entertainment. They have promised $250 million for community projects, such as a public safety plan created by former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and a multimillion-dollar civil rights museum that helped the Rev. Al Sharpton support it.
Experts in casinos say that the two other planned casinos in Manhattan—one on the West Side and one on the East Side—could also face problems because they would be close to residential areas.
But Soojin Ha, a professor at Cornell University’s business school, said that the planned resort on the West Side, which would be close to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, could bring in business travelers and convention goers if it can win over those who live nearby.
In Brooklyn, the leaders of the strange Mermaid Parade are among those fighting against a casino on Coney Island. They say that the plan would destroy many of the boardwalk’s famous rides and make it impossible for people to get to the public beach.
New York market could support 3 casinos, expert says
Four full casinos have opened in New York since the 2013 vote. However, they are all in upstate New York, many miles from Manhattan. And there are nine gambling halls in the state. These have slot machines and other electronic gambling tools, but no live table games.
The Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods casinos in Connecticut are owned by Native American tribes. They are about three hours’ drive north of Manhattan. Atlantic City’s casinos are two hours south, and the tribe-owned Wind Creek Casino is less than two hours straight west in Pennsylvania. It is built on the site of Bethlehem Steel.
Even though there is a lot of competition, John Holden, a business professor at Indiana University who specializes in gambling law, says that New York City’s dense market could support three gambling halls, based on where they are located.
“The gaming industry usually gives pretty optimistic revenue estimates,” he said. “But the New York City market is really like nothing else.”
Alan Woinski, a gambling consultant from New Jersey, said that the state could hedge its bets by giving two of the three licenses to racinos, which are slot parlors built next to horse race tracks and have been running successfully for years in the New York City area.
The Empire City Casino at Yonkers Raceway would get a $2.3 billion makeover from MGM Resorts. Resorts World, which is owned by the huge Malaysian gambling company Genting, wants to spend $5.5 billion to improve its gaming facility at Queens’s Aqueduct Racetrack.
Woinski said that those additions could be put in place in a few months, which would save the state years of waiting for the building of a whole new site before it could start making money.
