The Urban One Casino is a Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing
By Tavarris Spinks
As a fifth-generation, lifelong Richmonder, I’ve grown accustomed to the endless parade of lobbyists and developers who descend upon city hall year after year, each claiming to hold in their hands the solution to our city’s woes. And with each new proposal comes a renewed attempt to leverage the desperation of marginalized Richmonders to ensure a windfall of profits for a handful of investors.
I firmly believe that our city can and should embark on bold projects that uplift and empower our struggling communities. But, unfortunately, we have yet to see a project or proposal that meaningfully prioritizes the interests of vulnerable communities — the least of which is the proposed Urban One Casino development.
And the investors behind Urban One are well aware that voters have reasons to be skeptical. Chief among them is, of course, the fact that residents are now very wary of large-scale, taxpayer-supported projects (see: Navy Hill, Washington Football Team Training Camp). So, they took the time to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, and yes, the casino will not require a direct financial investment from the city’s coffers. But this is a conveniently narrow definition of cost when you consider the monetary and societal price tag facing the surrounding area for which the casino will bear no liability.
So let’s look a bit deeper: in a 2011 paper titled The Hidden Social Costs of Gambling, Baylor University Professor Earl Grinols concludes:
“The social costs of gambling are “hidden” only to the extent that they are often misunderstood or overlooked. Empirical studies (which estimate some, but not all, of the implied social costs of gambling) report that the impact on society of one additional pathological gambler is about $9,393 per year.
The social costs of gambling fall into nine groups: crime costs, business and employment costs, bankruptcy, suicide, illness related to pathological gambling, social service costs, direct regulatory costs, family costs, and abused dollars.”
When casinos implant themselves into struggling communities, they inflict caustic, irreparable social harm, with proximity to a casino being the key factor in creating a surge in pathological gamblers. For example, a 2005 study conducted by the University of Buffalo found that communities within 10 miles of one or more casinos have more than double the rate of excessive gambling problems.
Even by the conservative estimates produced by the National Center for Responsible Gaming, (an industry trade organization) 1.1 to 1.6 percent of Americans have a gambling disorder which is more than the number of women in the US living with a history of breast cancer (although independent estimates put the segment of problem gamblers at as high as 6%). And at least nine independent studies demonstrate that problem gamblers generate anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of total gambling revenues.
And the most attractive customers for casinos are the poor and the elderly. Casinos rely on those for whom even the slimmest chance of winning big would be too life-changing to pass up that they are willing to spend money that they cannot afford to lose.
But can casinos ever improve the quality of life in their communities? Well, many proponents of casino development point to Atlantic City as an example of when this kind of investment worked. When in fact, Atlantic City has one of the highest per-capita rates in the nation of gambling addiction among the local population. And the city continues struggling with attracting and retaining even a single grocery store (something Richmond’s southside had been struggling with long before a casino was ever being considered for the area).
I grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Richmond, and I worked for twelve years as a bankruptcy specialist at a local law firm, serving families ravaged by financial ruin. So I have seen firsthand the devastation of predatory lending and those who defraud the poor out of their savings — and this casino is no different.
We are not asking for the moon and stars; we are simply asking for the city to take meaningful action to ensure we put an end to the cycle of predatory business practices and civic malfeasance that has ravaged communities like the one I grew up in.
By voting against the casino, we are preventing the inevitable cascade of harm it will inflict on our city’s most vulnerable. We have the chance to send a message that we are not willing to settle for yet another project that comes at the expense of poor Black Richmonders. A vote against this predatory casino tells City Hall that it is time for a development that actually understands and prioritizes the urgent needs of our community.
