Mr. Boston

Casino is worth the risk

There is a really big question everyone with a real concern about locating a casino at Suffolk Downs is trying to answer.
Will a casino make East Boston a better place, with real estate worth more, with better infrastructure, with traffic mitigation, with tens of thousands of visitors coming here almost by the hour if a casino is built?
Obviously, the jury is out. Some homeowners I know believe East Boston will tank with a casino at Suffolk Downs.
“We’re out of here if a casino is built at Suffolk Downs,” one prominent member of the East Boston community said to me last week.
And he was serious.
I frankly don’t get the drift of that thinking.
If a casino is built at Suffolk Downs, and empty property is improved, and traffic is improved, and jobs are created and taxes are generated, and the place looks like $300 million instead of smelling like a pile of horse manure – well, how could a scenario like that lead to the neighborhood’s demise?
In fact, the airport, as invasive and unwanted as it has been over the decades, hasn’t managed to be the nail in the heart so many believe it to be for the East Boston neighborhood.
The airport is now three times the size of the neighborhood. Planes are overheard a good 18 hours a day, and during holidays and rush periods, the skies over Eastie are dotted with airplanes spewing their carbon dioxide burnoff into the air.
Yet the neighborhood has survived.
The neighborhood has also survived the influx of about 25,000 of the poorest non-English speaking people who have come to call this place their home.
It is to the community’s credit that the newcomers and the old-timers coexist. It is a high mark on the community that nearly everyone gets along, except for the handful of haters who complain about everything and everyone around here.
Let’s think about it – would East Boston be cleaner or dirtier with a casino? Would East Boston be safer or more dangerous? Would it be economically charged or would it become economically depressed? In other words, would a casino being built at Suffolk Downs signal the end of this neighborhood as we know and love it?
I guess the answer is unclear, according to many of the locals who fear the coming of a casino.
Many locals see it as the coming of another Logan Airport.
They’d rather see Suffolk Downs empty than developed.
Would that be better than placing a casino there?
I’m not completely sure, so I want to give my friends the benefit of the doubt until I have more information about what would be built there, and what its true effects might be.