Against the odds

Pennsylvania's gambling board approved the state's lucky 13th casino last week amid a glut that has much of the betting business folding fast. The chosen casino will go by the oddly emphatic name "Live!" - almost as if to tempt fortune and the marketplace to kill it.

Despite hesitating to approve Philadelphia's second slots emporium, the ironically dubbed Gaming Control Board recovered from that bout of good sense and rejoined what the New York Times called a "frenzy" of regional casino construction. In addition to Live! Hotel & Casino, slated for a site near South Philadelphia's sports complex, as many as half a dozen more New York and northern New Jersey casinos could speed the Northeast's rush into the age of the corner casino.

The day after the gambling board's decision, nearby Atlantic City's apocalypse continued apace, as the company poised to buy the doomed Revel casino for a dime on the dollar sounded a retreat. The former gambling mecca now stands to lose nearly half its casinos in a year. Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania and the other states that ate Atlantic City's lunch, gambling revenues have peaked.

Given what one analyst called an "oversupply situation," Live! and the other latecomers can get their money one of two ways: by stealing gamblers from other casinos - a prospect well understood by Philadelphia's first casino, which vigorously opposed the new license - or by creating new ones, a demonstrated consequence of convenience gambling. As one Live! executive put it, "We know this market will expand." So we now have a breed of government-sponsored enterprises that are bound to fail (or cause others to do so) even as they proselytize on behalf of an insidious social ill.

Like its predecessors, Live! is being justified as a sort of blackjack-based employment program. But what will happen when the losing casinos start hemorrhaging jobs? Politicians who have already forged an alliance with the gambling lobby will find that it's gone from supplying state revenue to demanding it.

While the state's gambling law contemplates a pair of Philadelphia casinos, it's hardly clear that the Gaming Control Board was bound by that provision. Indeed, it has yet to award the 14th license prescribed statewide. Moreover, several lawmakers and the governor who signed the law, Ed Rendell, counseled caution - though Gov.-elect. Tom Wolf was disappointingly quiet.

So can any good come of this "crappy slots-in-a-box project," as one of Live!'s competitors called it? At least the license went to the most realistic and well-located proposal, and not to those that threatened to plunk a casino - and perhaps a future eyesore - amid Center City neighborhoods where they could only hinder more desirable development.

That's not to say that Chester and Fishtown, which host the casinos closest to the Live! site, need more empty buildings. Nor should the nearby neighborhoods of South Philadelphia welcome what will likely be more of a social burden than an employment boon. Unluckily, they're just the latest losers in the government's grand gamble.