A little bit of full disclosure (as well as self-promotion) at the outside: in my life as an actor, I am currently working on a Web series about life in Atlantic City. It's written, produced and directed by a professor at Rutgers University who is also a native of the city, and has watched first hand the rise, and now fall, of the Casino Age in his home town. Without giving away any of the plot points in the season we're currently working on, I can tell you that, right now, we're wondering whether art is imitating life, or vice versa.
Because Atlantic City, which rose and fell once in the early part of the last century, and rose again in the 1970's with the advent of legalized casino gambling, is falling again. Not a little bit, but spectacularly. You can get an overview of what's happening here.
Are you surprised? If so, you shouldn't be. This is the most foreseeable trend many, including me, have had the lack of pleasure in foreseeing. We've been foreseeing it, in fact, ever since states neighboring New Jersey--New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and my home state of Maryland--looked at Atlantic City's success and thought they could duplicate it. In each state, the political leadership started to look at casino gambling as a unlimited pot of revenue gold, one that would spare them the unpleasant task of raising taxes, cutting services, or doing both.
The problem, of course, is that casino gambling isn't unlimited in any sense. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Gambling in any form is just another form of entertainment. And when hard times come for most people, entertainment dollars are the first thing to be cut. Unless you're the kind of compulsive gambler who will literally sell his birthday suit for another shot at the tables, you can find far cheaper ways of being entertained than sitting on a casino floor, handing over your money to the house one quarter or C-note at a time, and promising yourself that you're going to be rich if you just let yourself get suckered one more time. Read a book. Surf the Web. Have a nice, home-cooked meal with your family. In fact, almost anything.
As an industry in America, historically, casino gambling has only looked lucrative for a long time because, for a long time, only one state legalized it--Nevada. It's easy to get a big crowd if you're running the only pizza parlor in town but, as soon as everybody sees how much people like pizza, they're going to start opening other parlors, and test the limits of the market. Soon, the market gets more parlors than it needs, and some of them start to go out of business. Maybe a lot of them, if there's a really big number.
In fact, for a time, Atlantic City actually cut into Vegas' business, forcing Vegas to re-invent itself as a more family-friendly destination. Now, local competition is going to force Atlantic City to make the same hard choices. Will it go in the direction of Vegas? Or will it bet on other forms of vice (pun intended)? Only time will tell.
But what is clear is that the free ride for politicians is over. They will have to go back to growing spines, making choices, winning or losing elections in the process, and helping all of us to discover what we should always have know: there's no such thing as a free lunch. Not in Atlantic City, and not anywhere else.
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