On Monday night I dropped in on a gym in Corona, Queens to check out the second of three community town halls scheduled by New York state senator Jessica Ramos on New York Mets owner Steve Cohen’s plans to build an $8 billion casino project atop the city parkland currently in use as his team’s parking lots. After the first event back in May, Ramos had definitively pumped the brakes on state legislation that would be required to convert the parkland to another use, saying “a community discussion has been sorely lacking”; local opinion had been decidedly anti-casino at the initial meeting, so anticipation was high for the much-delayed followup.
As you can probably guess if you’ve ever been to one of these things — and don’t have to if you’re already read my article on the town hall that ran yesterday in Hell Gate — the vibes were intense from the start, especially once Ramos laid out the ground rules for what she hoped would be more workshop than shouting match:
After some brief crowd work from Ramos (“I know all the carpenters want to sit together, but that may not be possible…How was everybody’s Thanksgiving? I made waffles out of stuffing the next day!”) she laid out the ground rules for the night’s event. “We are going to roll up our sleeves today,” said the senator, and make sure “everybody understands what it would mean to build this or what it would mean for us not to build this.” To that end, two balloons had been set up at opposite ends of the gym. Those who wanted to craft a potential community benefits agreement to attach to Cohen’s plan were directed to sit by the pineapple balloon; those who wanted to work on an alternative plan, perhaps achieved by creating a community land trust, would sit by the flamingo balloon.
The crowd immediately split along ideological lines. Pineapples — many of whom wore union jackets or t-shirts from a newly formed group called the Coalition for Queens Advancement that featured Cohen’s metropolitanpark.com website printed prominently on the back — were pro-casino, hoping for new jobs and wanting mostly to ensure that they would be union ones. They outnumbered by about 2-to-1 the flamingos, who brought anti-casino signs and clutched handouts from a local anti-gentrification group called the Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance with a sketch of an alternative plan dubbed Phoenix Meadows that featured all green space and none of Cohen’s desired casinos, convention space, or even the ginormous parking garages (with solar panels on top) that the Mets owner planned to hold all the cars that would be displaced from the open-air parking lots. (The numerical disparity was possibly partly explained by the fact that FADA had decided to boycott the town hall as a casino-enabling sham and instead rally outside, with organizer Joseph Jung calling it an attempt to “socialize the community into accepting a casino just by trying to pass a community benefits agreement that can’t be enforced anyway.”)
Nobody on either side, it quickly became clear, had any intention of discussing their opposing stances with each other, or even writing down suggestions on the index cards that Ramos’s staff had dutifully provided for every folding table. The end of the meeting featured the senator grabbing a wireless mic and stalking the dwindling crowd like Phil Donahue, as flamingos argued that city parkland should be used for parks, while pineapples countered that since Cohen was granted a 99-year lease on the parking lots as part of his 2006 stadium deal, might as well try to extract some concessions like bike lanes or, as one of the younger participants requested, “solar panels so it doesn’t use oil or stuff that is bad.”
(If you’ve read this far and are wondering when I’m going to get to the potential public costs of all this: That part didn’t come up at all. As I noted the last time I wrote about this for Hell Gate, if the developers are able to build on city parkland without paying property taxes or rent or PILOTs or anything, that could amount to a huge public subsidy — but beyond the $8 billion construction price tag and the required $500 million tithe to the state for a casino license if one is approved, Cohen has steadfastly refused to discuss the finances of his plan, and nobody from his team showed up at the gym to take questions or even play with the pencils.)
All of which was fine enough, because aside from giving Ramos some talking points for her eventual faceoff with Cohen, nothing that was said on the evening is likely to matter much. FADA’s intimations that she’s a casino quisling aside, Ramos clearly seems intent on finding a third way that will transform the parking lots without simply swallowing the Mets owner’s plan whole: She at one point warned of “a casino that often extracts wealth and that could become obsolete now that all the gambling is happening on people’s phones,” but in the next breath declared that “we do not have the option of keeping the asphalt.” Cohen, meanwhile, has dismissed any talk of a casino-free development as “economically not feasible.” And each side has only one hammer, and that’s the power to block the other’s plans — Ramos by refusing to pass enabling legislation for development, Cohen by calmly tapping that 99-year lease and saying “casino or bust” — meaning the whole thing is likely to come down to a giant game of chicken, with both parties waiting to see who’ll blink first.
During a brief press scrum while everyone scrambled to pick their balloon affiliations, I asked Ramos how she thought those talks would go down, or even when they would happen. “I’m going to continue to meet with everybody who asks for a meeting,” she demurred. “This is going to be an ongoing conversation.” The next town hall is currently slated for sometime in 2024, after which the real haggling will no doubt commence.
It looks like casino arena/stadiums are going to be the new thing.
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/sport/mark-cuban-is-selling-the-dallas-mavericks/
“Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is selling a majority stake in the basketball team to billionaire Miriam Adelson, the largest shareholder at casino chain Las Vegas Sands, according to the Athletic, in a deal that would allow Cuban to maintain shares in the team and continue as its head of basketball operations.”
“Cuban told the Dallas Morning News last year that he had a goal to partner with Las Vegas Sands and build a new Mavericks arena—one that would be located in the middle of a Las Vegas-style resort and casino.”
The thing is- the metroplex has several facilities that will easily become casinos once Texas legalizes gaming (Gaylord resort, the Star area in Plano, the hotel/dining mall next to Globe life, Ft worth stockyards development). A Mavericks casino/stadium in downtown Dallas might be cool, but the market will be over saturated as soon as the Governor signs the bill into law. Not to mention the real gamblers will probably still be willing to drive to Winstar for looser slots.
This is an issue in New York as well, where there are likely to be three new casinos in and around NYC in coming years. I’m sure the state is mostly thinking, “Hey, if we get $500m a pop from each one, what do we care?”, but it also means the promised jobs may not be even as promising as the casino developers’ promises.
Do all the losses from local gamblers count against the apparent economic benefits? How is that accounted.
There’s growing evidence that the market is already saturated.
I found this article from 2022 (and it quotes an old colleague of mine, Chloe Taft Kang), but google “casino saturation” yields a lot of articles and analyses going back at least 10 years.
https://slate.com/business/2022/05/casinos-new-york-city-chicago-philadelphia.html
Somewhat related to this- Ballys seems to have overextended itself with their Chicago casino project. There’s murmurs that it might keep them from having the capital to redevelop the Tropicana site.
The temporary casino site in Chicago has had a decrease in gamblers. It might get worse during the winter. Maybe it will pick up next summer when more tourists come into town.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/11/8/23952896/ballys-chicago-casino-medinah-temple-revenue-daily-average-drop
Cuz that’s what tourists want to do in the summer in Chicago! Sit indoors and gamble!
Hahaha
It was a mistake to give the parking lots to the Mets for 99 years, but let’s make that a plus: Cohen needs to operate a parking lot for the 99 years. No one needs to do anything, he can wait until the contract is up in 2104, and then maybe negotiate for his casinos then.
If Ramos’s bottom line is “asphalt is not an option,” though, she’s not going to wait until the 22nd century.
Politicians fall for that trap all the time. Control of assets grants leverage in every negotiation, and politicians aren’t smart enough to maintain that control. The best example could be Chicago leasing out the parking meters for 75 years.
The politicians won’t be there when to take the blame.
Between the parking lease scam, 3000 different residential parking zones and all those red light school park zone cameras, I refuse to enter the City of Chicago. There might as well be a Berlin Wall down Devon Avenue.
It’s a good way to cut down traffic and make the city more pedestrian-friendly.
There’s also a soccer stadium, “Naming Rights Sponser Stadium” wanting to use the same parking lot. Apparently they have reached an understanding with Cohen on parking lot use, a MOU? There’s a community board committee voting tonight on whether to approve the stadium proposal. Apparently the board’s only concerns are parking, the hotel, and a new police station.
Tom, where did you see that there’s an MOU? That’s news to me.
People, people, people!
(aka: Friends, Romans, Countrymen!)
It is well known that the only way to fund anything is by attaching it to a casino.
Multiple studies that I have commissioned show directly that casinos which fail to produce the anticipated revenue only do so because of ‘responsible gaming’ programs that lure people into believing that they will lose money if they gamble and that they should only gamble what they can afford to lose.
Debbie Downer. What is the point of investing in gambling with this kind of garbage being fed to the punters? I mean you don’t force car dealers to show graphic images of mutilated bodies from freeway crashes to buyers before they sign, right? We are being discriminated against.
The real problem in all this is the bleeding heart namby pambies who just don’t want to see anyone lose money at gambling. This is a false non-equivalence. Sure: SOME people may lose money at gambling, but other people get it. For every loser, there are many winners. Just like taxation! Only in reverse. And we at the League know all about taxation!
Look at it this way: If we weren’t taking money (*or equivalent value assets) from problem gamblers at casinos, we would have to take more of your tax dollars to fund our businesses. That would just be not right! We only take what we need because we can get the rest from gamblers. And parking and seat licenses. Also from RSN fees and streaming. There are concessions and expansion fees and luxury payroll taxes and a few other things, but mainly the focus is on taking the minimum amount of tax dollars we absolutely need to fund our operations.
We even offer 50/50 draws that gamblers can enter to try to win back some of the money they might, under the rarest of circumstances, not have won at the casinos or racetracks or state lotteries etc.
The thing with the Mets is that they are a small market. You can’t expect them to compete with the Yankees and Rays and Pirates. Not to mention the Royals. You just can’t. So they need this. And you need to give it to them right away.
Steve spent $150m more than anyone else this year on players just to win for the fans of Queens. That money has to come from somewhere and it can’t be from him because he doesn’t have it. He’s just a guy, you know. Trying to help baseball fans in Queens the only way he knows how.
There is an MLB ready stadium just sitting there in Oakland and another one just sitting there in Montreal waiting for a team to become available. The Mets cannot continue to lose money in a small market like Queens. It cannot happen. And we will make sure it doesn’t.
To Mr. Jungs point: do community benefits ever happen? There’s a contract? Is it enforceable? Thanks!
https://citylimits.org/2022/06/17/when-developers-promise-community-benefits-who-holds-them-accountable/
Thanks!
Ethan Goodman of Queens Development Group is quoted in Hudson River Blue re: a MOU re: parking for Naming Rights Sponser Stadium:
https://hudsonriverblue.com/nycfc-stadium-willets-point-queens-community-board-7-meetings-2023/#google_vignette
I was looking at the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Agreement not-for-profit website yesterday. They seem to spend $900,000.00/yr on something, there’s no details/accountability. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the taxes the Yankees should be paying, but aren’t.
Thanks — I talked to someone else who was at yesterday’s community board meeting on the NYCFC stadium, and apparently there are claims there’s an MOU but no one has actually produced it.
And the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Agreement is such a stupendous joke, it should be taught in CBA school as an example of what not to do. Or, I guess, what to do if you want to have no accountability at all.