They alienated public parkland so a billionaire could build a casino on top of it, and they called it an economic gamechanger. The Guardian reported this week on the Metropolitan Park project — Steve Cohen’s $8 billion casino and entertainment complex on the Willets Point parking lots next to Citi Field, blessed by Albany’s “parkland alienation” bill, signed memorandums of understanding with a handful of community nonprofits, and approved through what the developer calls “one of the most rigorous and transparent public reviews of any project.” Sixty-one percent of likely Democratic voters in the surrounding congressional district nonetheless oppose it. The developers promise 23,000 jobs, $100 million a year in local spending, and more than $1 billion in community benefits, including “culturally sensitive” addiction services. The neighborhood that would live with the machine calls it a predatory project. Both cannot be right, and the math decides which one isn’t.
Let the developers have their strongest point. The process was long — four years of public meetings, approvals from six community boards, the city council, the state legislature, the gaming commission. They have signed MOUs with real organizations: Elmcor Youth & Adult Activities, Hamilton-Madison House, Korean Community Services, the Korean American Family Service Center. They promise a public park, a bridge to downtown Flushing called the “Flushing Skypark,” and a “dedicated Queens vendor food hall.” A comprehensive environmental impact study found the project “will not directly displace any existing businesses or residents.” On paper, the developer has dotted every i.
I have seen this paper before.
I used to trade agricultural futures on a Chicago desk. The pitches came in thick — a new derivatives product that would let farmers hedge, a new packaging facility that would bring jobs, a new processing plant that would revitalize a small town. The pitches always had three things — a glossy deck, a list of community partners, and an environmental impact study that concluded what the developer had already decided. The deck was the product. The community partners were the receipt. The EIS was the cover. The hedge fund, the snack-food giant, the meatpacker — they didn’t come to make the town richer. They came to extract what the town had been holding in common, and they dressed the extraction as investment.
The Flushing casino is the same pitch with a different commodity. The commodity here is not corn or cattle. It is the disposable income of working-class immigrants, many of them elderly, many of them isolated, many of them already struggling with gambling addiction. Studies cited by the Guardian and others have found that Chinese immigrant communities have higher rates of problem gambling — driven by cultural beliefs about luck, by the stresses of immigration, by language and access barriers to mental healthcare, and by a casino industry that has learned exactly how to market to them. The developer’s own billion-dollar benefits package includes funding for “responsible gaming, addiction and mental health services.” You do not put a line item for treating the harm unless you have already concluded the harm will be done. The line item is the confession, not the cure.
Jack Hu, a Flushing resident whose father developed a gambling addiction soon after immigrating from Guangzhou, told the Guardian the casino operators use “meal coupons, free bus vouchers, free gambling vouchers to lure working-class Asians into casinos so that they can take their money.” Read that sentence again. It is a recipe for extraction written in the developer’s own marketing language. The bus brings the customer. The coupon seats the customer. The voucher starts the customer. The customer does the rest. The same playbook is being run today in the Imperial Valley, where a billion-dollar data center proposal has been sold to a working-class county as economic salvation. The glossy deck and the community advisory board differ only in commodity.
What we used to call economic development in my tradition, I now watch called something else. The Sand County farmers I grew up among would have recognized it instantly. The man who would buy a widow’s house with borrowed money, bill her estate for the privilege, and call the deal a turnaround would not have impressed anyone at her table. He would have been told, with the particular plainness of the sand counties, that he had not bought anything. He had rented a place to stand while he took what was there. That is what the Metropolitan Park project is. The Willets Point parking lots are public land — set aside as the open space the city promised the neighborhood when it built Shea Stadium and again when it built Citi Field. To build the casino, state senator John Liu introduced — and Albany passed — Senate Bill S7121A, the “parkland alienation” bill, which allows a local government to repurpose public parkland for non-park uses. Public parkland was the only thing standing between the developer’s plan and the developer’s profit. So the state made it legal to take the parkland and built the bridge to downtown Flushing as the consolation prize. The state alienated the common good so a private party could capture the rent. In exchange, Senator Liu’s campaign received a $5,000 donation from the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council’s PAC, a labor union that receives the majority of its funding from the very Hotel and Gaming Trades Council whose members would build the casino.
This is not a small thing. It is the moral line. The earth — and the parks we have made on it — was given for the use of all. Private property is real and legitimate, but it answers to a prior truth: what is held in common belongs to no one’s spreadsheet. When you alienate parkland to install an extraction machine, you are not just breaking a planning rule. You are converting the universal destination of goods into the private destination of margin. You are taking what generations of New Yorkers paid for and handing it to one billionaire for his second billion. You are doing it with a straight face because you have named the process “economic development.” Hilaire Belloc called this the servile state — a system in which the propertyless trade their freedom for guaranteed subsistence under capital. The Flushing casino is not the servile state in the old industrial sense. It is the new version: a working-class immigrant community, mostly without the cushion of accumulated property, trades its tranquility and a portion of its elders’ savings for the promise of jobs and a bridge. The propertyless trade the future for the present. The trader wins.
What gets built instead? Not a casino. Not another extraction machine imported from the playbook of Atlantic City or Las Vegas. The answer is what Flushing already has, multiplied. The community that came together to oppose this project is not asking for a gift. It is asking that the public land remain public, that the existing Main Street of family-run businesses be protected from the rent shock the casino will bring, and that the public investment the developer is dangling be made directly — to the community, on the community’s terms, not as a bribe wrapped around a project that does the harm first.
The instruments exist. A community land trust, with the immigrant business corridor held in trust for the families who operate the shops, would protect against the displacement the developer denies and the Urban Institute forecasts — up to 16,000 renters in Corona and Flushing who already spend more than half their income on housing. A cooperative ownership structure for any new commercial space would keep the rents and the equity inside the community. A binding community benefits agreement — not a memorandum of understanding, which is a letter of intent the developer can walk away from, unenforceable in court — would put the billion dollars the developer claims into escrow before a single shovel goes in the ground. And the park stays a park, because that is what it was supposed to be.
These are not utopian instruments. They are working instruments. Community land trusts have kept working-class neighborhoods in Burlington and Boston and dozens of cities between them intact through boom-and-bust cycles the casino industry writes the script for. Cooperatives are old — Rochdale, 1844; Capper-Volstead, 1922; the rural electric cooperatives that brought power to places the investor-owned utilities would not serve. They centralize nothing. They concentrate no power. They answer to the people who use them. They are what subsidiarity is for, if your tradition still means anything — the higher body should not absorb what the lesser can do. The state of New York has no business alienating parkland so a billionaire can build a casino. The developer has no business writing the community a check in exchange for the right to take its money. The community has every business holding what it has.
The neighborhood has been told this is inevitable. The 2012 state referendum put three casinos in New York. The state senator argues that, given the inevitability, he negotiated the maximum public benefit. The developer argues that 23,000 jobs and a park and a bridge and a billion dollars in benefits are the best the community could hope for, and that to refuse is to refuse prosperity itself.
But what is the community being asked to trade? The fruit stands. The restaurants. The family bakery where Xiang has worked for seven years. The savings of the elderly immigrants who came here with nothing and built a little. The park that was supposed to remain a park. The Skypark is not a substitute for the park. The vendor food hall is not a substitute for the family businesses. The addiction services line item is not a substitute for not needing addiction services. The 23,000 jobs do not erase the 16,000 renters who will be displaced, or the elders whose savings the bus-and-voucher machine will harvest.
I do not live in Flushing. I live in Adams County, Wisconsin, and I have watched my own Main Street hollowed out by exactly this sequence of decisions, each dressed in the language of inevitability and economic development. The railroad left. The mills left. The dairy left. What replaced them was the amenity economy — second homes, golf courses, a casino in every man’s pocket. The difference is that nobody even bothered to alienate a park for my neighbors. They just let the wages leave. Residents in Montana’s Flathead County are pushing back against the same conversion — the working place becoming other people’s playground — that Flushing is being asked to undergo. The community is right to refuse.
The developers will call this NIMBYism. I call it what my tradition calls it: the universal destination of goods, violated. The common good, alienated. The community’s life, sold to a man who will never set foot on its Main Street except to count what he took from it.