Construction Projects May Gamble On Vegas Recovery

Vegas is seeing an ongoing recovery but does that mean its ready to restart its constant cycle of renewal with more destruction and construction?

Twenty five years ago, when Vegas and Atlantic City held sway of the entire nation’s ability to gamble legally, in the days before there were really any Online gambling sites in the US to speak of, and prior to the scattering of casinos across the US, particularly the north east, like sprinkles on a birthday cake, you would have been laughed out of either municipality for claiming that a time would come when gambling wouldn’t be enough to lure visitors to the area.

Those were heady days of a duopoly, the concentration of supply in two small areas acting like two poles of a magnet with the US gambling population as iron filing inextricably drawn to these centers of gambling, gaming and overall excess. The stories of that age are now legend, with Atlantic City getting its own historical gangster television show, and Vegas getting yet another movie about it that implies everyone in the city is either a gangster, a gambler or a victim of either one.

Phrases like “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” might make the experienced smile, the innocent tut and the traumatized remind themselves not to go on stag nights like that again, but their inherent indication was that it was a wild hedonistic place of peccadilloes and indiscretions all centered around the excuse for people being there; Gambling. Perhaps at one time it was, maybe even still is if you know where to look, but that central excuse has ceased to be the one-size-fits-all reason it once was.

When one can gamble twenty minutes down the interstate why travel out to the middle of a desert or all the way to the coast? Certainly a trip to Atlantic City will make your gambling experience more special as you sniff the bracing sea air and stalk the Boardwalk, and indeed Vegas is still the neon lit jewel of Nevada with all its inherent connotations and atmosphere, neither one by any stretch unattractive to visit, and yet fewer people do, and worse fewer people gamble when they get there.

Using Gambling To Save Gambling Is A Big Gamble

The fiscal crisis that swept the world as the sub-prime mortgage market decided to slap the banks in the face for their greed, and the banks in turn, still not having learned the error of their ways, got even more greedy and blackmailed several nations into bailing them out with huge quantities of cash, was an economic disaster that caused many a home to be repossessed and many a business to go to the wall, unsurprisingly some of these have been casinos.

In those grim-dark days gambling was touted by its supporters as being a possible engine of rejuvenation, states threw off years of anti-gambling rhetoric and started lotteries or opened casinos, the tax revenues they’d seen other states make in the nineties awfully attractive to states facing the economic squeeze, but there are very few cases in which the revenues have matched forecasts, and as competition built up about them, the old duopoly felt the pinch hardest.

• Vegas Recovery Bodes Well
• Gaming revenues up five years in a row
• Visitor numbers holding steady


Money has been mobile casinos have been flexible

Casinos that specifically came with the promise of stimulating the local economy and reinvigorating the number of visitors were planned, they were built, they were opened and then, in at least one case, simply closed again. Their empty closed hulks now haunt Atlantic City like massive boulders left over by a retreating glacier that took all the money away with it. Despite this, perhaps displaying just a little too little imagination, local officials are still trying to use gambling as a recovery tool.

Legal sports gambling in New Jersey might well please those who like to bet on sports in the US, particularly those close to Chris Christie’s state, and indeed has received some support as a concept from the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, but to think it will lift the economy by itself is to once again place all one’s eggs in a basket you already know has a hole in it. Gambling is no longer the be all and end all and both Atlantic City and Vegas will have to adjust, but sadly only one of them is.

Vegas Has New Visitors

When visitor numbers to Vegas fell dramatically in 2008 and then again in 2009 the side effects of the economic crisis were obvious to the casino accountants. You can’t lose three million potential gamblers and not notice it on the bottom line, and indeed it took the city as a whole four years to rebuild those visitor numbers back up to even an approximation of the pre-crisis crowds, and crowds there had been for 2007 had been a bumper year for Vegas.

Gaming revenues had grossed $10,868,464,000 from over 39 million visitors, hotel occupancy rates were topping 94% and the number of air passengers had grown to a staggering 47,729,527 people. These were profitable times, and then suddenly, they weren’t. The malaise that set in proved tough to weather for the capital of fun, but in the end, as the world began to recover from its knee-in-groin fiscal calamity, Vegas began to recover too, but perhaps unlike Atlantic City, Vegas had learned its lesson.

The diversification of attractions in Vegas has been a practical sensible reflection of the increase in the slice of visitors that are not in Vegas to gamble, but to just be in Vegas where so much gambling has gone on and so much gambling news
made. The reputation as a seedy gangster ridden corruption pit full of undercover FBI agents wearing microphones in their lapels might not appeal to those that gamble, per se, but to a movie-going television audience that’s too worried about ISIS to visit Canada…

Of course the “When in Vegas…” excuse still applies, and people who might not go specifically to gamble still may do so whilst there, this then sees a helpful boost to gaming revenues as as they rise again, slowing regaining ground to $9,676,458,000 in 2013, those construction projects halted by the crash start to come alive again, and plans for new attractions and new casinos begin to be rumored by serious people with serious money behind them. Vegas put its constant cycle of renewal on hold in 2008, might we now be about to see it restart?