Occasions Sq. is roaring back from the pandemic. “Ghost town” is a dim memory. Theaters and places to eat are packed. Companies are leasing far more floors in office towers even ahead of the buildings fill up again with stay human workers.
As day by day foot targeted visitors of 350,000 approaches pre-pandemic stages, the previous thing the “Crossroads of the World” wants is on line casino gambling. The hocus-pocus is currently being pushed by the normal suspects — actual estate and lodge companies and labor unions — and egged on by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who might instantly raise the statewide ban on new casinos which is presently in effect right until 2023.
It is a snake-oil gambit that will arrive up snake eyes for Situations Sq. and the public. What Moments Square needs is additional cops — not slots.
If people want to gamble, they can wager $23.99 on Bubba Gump’s industrial-quality shrimp — or on getting photographed with Elmo without having receiving taken to the cleaners.
Let us start with the clear: In a world awash in casinos, which include in the US, and the on line betting growth, why does any gambler will need to go to Periods Square? They really don't. The press for casinos there has a single aim in mind: to enrich builders, hotel operators and union users, none of whom will likely endure if the venues flop and taxpayers foot the bills.
Casino proponents drool about intended tax advantages and work generation. But situation just after situation has proven that casinos are pretty much always financial boondoggles. Too quite a few of them all-around the US went tummy-up, together with in Atlantic Town wherever taxpayers are possessing to bail out a number of under-undertaking attributes.
In point, casinos generate a so-named regressive tax — this means they suck funds from men and women who can minimum pay for it. Fail to remember James Bond and tuxedoed oligarchs duking it out in Monte Carlo. Very poor persons gamble a lot a lot more than rich people today. Just appear at the unfortunate-confronted grandmas who acquire the bus to the Atlantic City boardwalk and go household poorer.
Times Sq. has accomplished so nicely without having slot equipment that TikTok and Roku not too long ago moved their neighborhood headquarters there. Even a key instructional institution, Touro Higher education, has established up a big “campus” within a single of the workplace properties. Large new motels like the Tough Rock and Riu Plaza opened, self-confident that the pandemic’s waning will justify the investments.
But a person detail stands in the way of ongoing progress: criminal offense, which leapt 20% in the 1st quarter of this calendar year compared to the exact period of time in 2021. Superior-profile Moments Sq. horrors have integrated women pushed to their deaths on subway tracks and display-goers caught in crossfires.
The peril extends further than NYPD stats. Although the location isn’t the open-air drug market place and mugging ground of 30 decades back, any stroller, business office worker or tourist can see and smell (thanks to pot all over the place) the menace.
I’m a great deal a lot more alert than I was just three decades back. The 3-Card-Monte hustlers are not back — at minimum not nonetheless. But I’m often pestered by children striving to market me fake CDs and even shadier characters, like the kinds who milled about the Longacre Theatre in a downpour a couple nights back right after a general performance of “Macbeth.”
This is what we have to have to deal with now — not the imaginary added benefits of casinos, the worst bet that the metropolis and point out would at any time make.
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