Whether the strategy was even a good one to begin with is a matter of some debate. “As a result, most casinos today do not represent economic development engines.” “New casinos not only pull gamblers from other casinos, they pull non-casino revenues from other outlets,” Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and the co-author of the American casino history Governing Fortune, told me. We are now in the era of diminishing returns. Then, starting in the 1990s, states like Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania embraced casinos as a tool of urban revitalization. Beginning in 1988, casinos opened with staggering speed on Native American reservations, bringing jobs and money to tribal communities-but also increased rates of violence, crime, and bankruptcy. Las Vegas emerged as the nation’s marquee gambling destination in the 1950s and ’60s Atlantic City, New Jersey, followed in 1977. But these groundbreakings will also represent the end of an era in which the urban casino became a popular and controversial tool of economic development.
