New York City has come down with gambling fever: in just one of its boroughs, eight casino construction projects are on the table. A state board created specifically to grant licenses will announce its decisions before the end of the year. Five initiatives will be discarded and only three licenses will be approved. And this unusual fervor has even touched the Trump Organization, as one of the proposed projects would be built on the golf course formerly managed by the Republican president’s empire in the Bronx.

The eight licenses were requested back in June, within an unusually short period for bidding. And the three developers that win the concession must each deposit $500 million, the license fee, by December 31. The first phase of evaluating the proposals has cleared the competition in a pre-selection process conducted by the so-called community advisory committees (CACs). Each bid has been assigned a CAC, which is composed of six representatives from the state, the municipality, as well as the borough where the proposed project would be built.

These first-instance committees have approved two of the projects: one in southeast Queens and another in Yonkers. The New York Gaming Facility Location Board will ultimately decide on them.Three other projects are pending votes by the corresponding CACs, while three more — the most challenging for the city’s urban fabric — have been discarded. The most notable was the proposal for a casino next to the UN headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, which was rejected on September 22. Manhattan hasn’t been lucky during this process: in addition to the one adjacent to the United Nations, projects in Times Square and in the borough’s financial district have been rejected.

On the other hand, community advisory committees have approved a project in the Bronx, the borough with the lowest incomes in the city. This is the juiciest project, due to its connection to the golf course once managed by the Trump Organization. If ultimately approved, the president’s family business would receive $115 million from the agreement that Bally’s, the casino development group, signed with the real estate firm in 2023. This amount is in addition to the $60 million that Bally’s already paid to acquire the rights to operate the site. Of all the projects, it offers the most cinematic setting: the Manhattan skyline can be seen over the gentle hills of the golf course.

Plans to open new casinos have been up in the air for years, ever since the state legislature approved a gaming expansion back in 2013. Until then, only certain forms of gambling were permitted: racetracks, state lotteries, as well as casinos on Indigenous lands. A change to the Constitution of the State of New York has since allowed the opening of four casinos in the northern part of the state. In 2022, Albany, the seat of the state legislature, approved a process to award three projects in the southern part of the state (New York City and its metropolitan area) as part of that year’s budget negotiations.

Numerous criticisms

The proliferation of casinos has been met with considerable criticism from many residents. They fear that the casinos will significantly change (for the worse) the landscape of the neighborhoods where they’ll be built. This includes iconic city spaces such as Coney Island — with one of New York’s longest beaches — and Citi Field, the Mets’ grand stadium.

In Coney Island, for example, residents and operators of the amusement rides that line the boardwalk have risen up against the plan. And the communities surrounding Citi Field, in a neighborhood that has a large immigrant population, have also suggested an alternative to the project. Developers responded by asserting that, by law, they must invest a minimum of $500 million in the area where a casino will be located, which could mean anything from building social housing to improving local public transportation.

According to a City Limits study, the new gaming facilities will generate $5.5 billion in gross revenue and $841 million annually in taxes, while creating 30,000 jobs.

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