Casino Homeless

Sep 18, 2019 A 32-YEAR-OLD woman killed herself after blowing £36,000 in a two-week casino spree and leaving her mum homeless. Kimberley Wadsworth, from Ilkley, West Yorks, started gambling in 2015 when her. Thousands of dollars that were supposed to support struggling veterans in Pierce County instead was spent in local casinos, withdrawn from casino ATM machines, and transferred into someone’s. The casinos are deserted and thousands of hotel rooms are empty. But when Las Vegas, gripped by the coronavirus, needed space for a temporary homeless shelter, officials chose a location that does.

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With a new advertising blitz and a new $2.4 billion casino, Atlantic City was betting on a comeback this summer. Instead, the stabbing deaths of two tourists in broad daylight last week outside of the Bally’s casino underscored the seedy side of Atlantic City that officials like to gloss over. (Disclosure: I edit an anti-gambling blog.)

In an effort to reassure tourists that it was safe to go back into the casinos, Governor Chris Christie came to town and drank a beer at the Irish Pub. Keep drinking, guv. The problems of Atlantic City are big and deep, and can’t be fixed by a new slogan and another casino.

To be sure, the 10 a.m. murders of the two Asian women from Canada were random and could have happened anywhere. But the victims were no doubt in Atlantic City because of the casinos. The alleged killer was a homeless woman with mental problems.

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An Inquirer story last week inferred that many surrounding towns send their homeless to Atlantic City’s shelters and soup kitchens via buses. William Southrey, president of the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, called it “Greyhound therapy.”

Perhaps. But the story offered no evidence to support Southrey’s claim. This much is true: There is a link between gambling and increased homelessness. Several years after casinos came to Atlantic City, the Associated Press reported on a study that found half of the city’s homeless arrived after the casinos opened.

A 2003 survey of 120 homeless living in the Rescue Mission found that 20 percent listed gambling as a contributing factor to their plight. The Mission’s own website says the arrival of casinos led to an increase in homeless in Atlantic City.

The 1999 National Gambling Impact Study Commission, the definitive study on gambling in America, found that “individuals with gambling problems seem to constitute a higher percentage of the homeless population.” The commission said the Atlantic City Rescue Mission reported that 22 percent of its clients are homeless due to a gambling problem.

In a survey of 1,100 clients at Rescue Missions nationwide, 18 percent cited gambling as a cause of their homelessness. Interviews with more than 7,000 homeless individuals in Las Vegas revealed that 20 percent reported a gambling problem.

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So clearly, casinos contribute to homelessness. That seems like a detail other communities and lawmakers should keep in mind when considering whether or not to legalize casinos. In short, some of today’s gamblers eventually end up broke and on the street, costing taxpayers’ money to feed and take care of them.

In fact, gambling has been linked to other problems such as increases in crime, bankruptcy, divorce and suicide. As such, it is fair to argue that gambling leads to deeper social and economic problems that undermine the jobs and tax revenue that come from casinos.

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That is not to say the casinos are to blame for last week’s murder in Atlantic City. But the grizzly deaths underscore the 30-year failure of gambling to revitalize the struggling Jersey Shore town. If anything, gambling has brought more problems to Atlantic City than it has solved.

Despite the billions of dollars that have flowed through the casinos over the years, Atlantic City remains a poor, corrupt and dysfunctional city. Outside the gleaming casinos, the desolate streets are littered with homeless, drug addicts and prostitutes.

Homeless Casino Buses

Pawn shops, pay-day lenders and soup kitchens abound, save for a couple block stretch of attractive retail outlets. The casinos have not spurred much other commercial development. The residential real estate boom that has lifted the surrounding Jersey Shore points has largely skipped past Atlantic City.

After the murder of the tourists, the Daily News was rightly chastised for its over-the-top headline calling Atlantic City a “Tourist Death Trap.” Ironically, the alleged killer is from Philadelphia—a city that knows a thing or two about murders.

But the heinous murders highlight a larger point regarding the failure of casinos to transform Atlantic City. At the end of the day, gambling strips wealth from communities, leads to more social problems and generates little economic spin off.

Instead, most of Atlantic City’s “tourists” gamble and go home. That may be good for the casinos’ bottom line and government coffers, but most everyone else loses.

I worked as a homeless outreach worker in Las Vegas from September 2015 to April 2016, and during that time I had the opportunity to interact with homelessness on the front line. There were many hours spent with “clients” of our small non-profit as we performed a sort of concierge service, working our asses off trying to connect them with services like housing, food, getting identification, and meeting any other need we could. It was a great privilege and a humbling experience to hear firsthand the stories people shared about their lives, and many nights after work were spent pacing around nervously in my apartment trying to process the events of the day. It’s not an easy job, and it takes a certain skill set of patience, humility, compassion, assertiveness, fearlessness, and tirelessness to face individuals who for very complex reasons live outside the margins of society.

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One theme I heard repeated from many different individuals is that the streets of Las Vegas are harder than just about anywhere else. I even had three or four long time felons for things like manslaughter, sexual crimes, and aggravated assault tell me that prison was easy compared to the streets here. If federal prison is hard time, being homeless in Las Vegas is harder time.

And there are a lot of reasons that could explain why the homeless in Las Vegas experience such harsh conditions.

• Struggling Economy: I know, everywhere is struggling most of the time. But Las Vegas has performed especially poorly compared to the national average. In 2008, after the subprime mortgage bubble fiasco, Nevada was one of the top 3 (bottom 3?) states in terms of home foreclosures. At that time, about 1 in 14 homes received a foreclosure notice and many families simply walked away from their properties. Currently we rank 42nd in the country on unemployment rates. And all of this seems peculiar considering we have these money printing factories on the world famous Las Vegas Strip that bring in cash to the tune of $500 million a month. Maybe “mismanaged economy” is a more accurate title than “struggling”. The fact that we have a 0% corporate income tax and no state income tax might have something to do with it.
• Lack of Mental Health Services: Nevada ranks basically dead last in the nation on almost every indicator of mental and behavioral health. Worse, studies show that our poor mental health statistics correlate with all kinds of other negative outcomes like unemployment, low graduation rates, high rates of homelessness, and high violent crime rates. The suicide rate in Nevada is consistently double the national average, and before you say “well that’s just tourists offing themselves in hotel rooms after gambling away all their money”… yeah, that happens a lot too, I feel sorry for the cleaning staff in this town… Our youth suicide statistics are equally tragic, and they they aren’t allowed into casinos to gamble.
• Overly Bureaucratic System: I’m going to write a follow-up post in a few days on the politics of homelessness in Las Vegas. For now, suffice it to say that we have a system that is not designed to “end homelessness”, as if that were a realistic goal to begin with. The vast majority of funding for housing Nevada’s homeless comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and tied to that money is a mind-boggling set of restrictions, rules, and regulations (the 3 R’s of real life). HUD flaunts their science-based methodology as being the gold standard of efficiency for identifying, classifying, and in theory housing a city’s homeless population. Well, that is certainly up for debate.

I have personally witnessed and experienced the frustration of trying to connect homeless individuals with social services they desperately need. At some point, homelessness becomes a world of Catch-22’s. Was your ID lost or stolen? Well that means you can’t go to the DMV to get a new one because you have no way to prove your identity. Are you disabled and trying to apply for disability benefits? Well you can’t because you haven’t been seeing a doctor and have no evidence of your condition. Do you need to see a doctor? Well you can’t because you have no ID, remember?

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Homeless outreach can be a deeply rewarding job, but the feelings of progress can be few and far between and you have to be ready for many, many gut-wrenching setbacks. But the setbacks have to be anticipated. It’s hard out there on the streets. Unrelentingly hard. If you can suspend judgment about how a homeless individual got into the mess they’re in, it’s a lot easier to appreciate that the homeless, especially in Las Vegas, are in a near impossible struggle against themselves, and other people, and our system. Compassion is the only way I can see out of this problem, and it’s in very short supply in our city. As long as we remain hard in our attitudes and actions towards homelessness, life on the streets will remain harder.