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Governor Christie’s Plan for Atlantic City Marginalizes City’s Poor Yet Again

The July 31, 2023, By Jerry K. Polak

While Governor Christie’s plan to rejuvenate Atlantic City is ambitious, it is to be questioned whether there is not more beneath the surface, and whether it will really do Atlantic City any good. Creating a high class, high roller casino ghetto would of course cater only to the rich, while leaving the poor out of the picture. online casino news: Governor Christie’s Plan for Atlantic City Marginalizes City’s Poor Yet Again

What Governor Christie ignores, as everyone has done for the past three decades, the other ghetto present in Atlantic City; made up of people who were simply too poor to move out when real estate prices began to plummet. This other ghetto is indeed the reason the city did not live up to its potential, and did not become the new Las Vegas of the East Coast.

However, what Las Vegas understands too well, and Atlantic City has yet to grasp, is that casinos don’t work without non-gambling civilian support. When Atlantic City forst began to get a name for itself as a gambling Mecca around 1980, most of the casinos did not know that they would actually fail due to their ignorance of the city’s non-gambling residents. Although the idea was that gambling money would make Atlantic City the “playground of the world,” the vision did not come to pass solely because the casinos and the city planners grabbed short term opportunities while excluding considerations that could have benefitted that city as a whole, as well as protect their long term investments.

The casino people turned their backs on the ramshackle streets and alleys just off the Boardwalk, and Christie's proposal would set in stone this deadly division of the two ghettos. The wall he's building would guarantee the permanence of the city's ugly side.

The concept that could have worked in 1980 was redevelopment of the entire city as a gambling, sports, entertainment, and family complex, which could have survived inevitable competition from other states. What Atlantic City needed was a bulldozer six blocks wide to convert the slums into open spaces and an unassailable entertainment destination: Disneyland with casinos.

Rich and middle-income people had long ago left Atlantic City, leaving those without the resources and ability to pull themselves out of the mire. The tens of thousands of casino employees hired since have already chosen not to live in the city. For the most part, they opted to live elsewhere, taking with them their taxes and spending. And the entire retail industry moved with the fleeing middle class, deepening the desperate poverty of those who remained.



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