Detroit’s Casinos Leave Some Locals Feeling Spent

Rudy and Betty Pritchett, husband-and-wife auto workers, loved gambling at the three downtown casinos so much they were spending up to $6,000 a year playing the rows of clanging, flashing slot machines.

Then a few months ago they decided they had to ease up.

“We’re just trying to slowly get away from it,” said Rudy, a 52-year-old crane operator. The couple now sets the slot money aside for retirement. But every once in a while, the Pritchetts give in to the urge and sneak back to the casinos with $200 to try their luck.

“It’s addictive,” he’s said in the past.

For good or ill, Detroit, like the Pritchetts, is hooked on casino gambling. After the first Las Vegas-style casino opened in 1999, a veritable gold rush of retirees, suburbanites and factory workers has transformed this declining auto capital into one of the hottest gambling spots in the country. And since Sept. 11, business has only gotten better.

In March, the casinos tallied their first month of more than $100 million in revenues; the total dipped to $97.1 million in April, but it was still 25% ahead of last year. Gamblers here spend more per slot machine or table position ($337) than their counterparts on the famed Las Vegas Strip ($204) or Atlantic City ($271), according to statistics compiled by Bear Stearns.

But what makes Detroit’s casinos unique are the people losing the bets, experts say. While cities like Vegas get rich from tourists who spend money and then leave, casinos here are raking it in from a steady clientele who live in the area, said William R. Eadington, a University of Nevada-Reno economics professor and commercial gaming authority.

“Detroit is the first city that established land-based casinos primarily for metropolitan residents within the city core,” said Eadington. “This is America’s first true experience with urban casinos.”

The results have been mixed. Detroit reaps huge benefits--$113 million in annual wagering taxes, more than 8,000 service jobs, a 24-hour night life--but also pays the price of social fallout.

Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick and City Council members are locked in a feud over how much to tax the casinos--a fight that is delaying plans for the gaming houses to build luxury hotel rooms in time for the 2006 Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, Kilpatrick ticks off the human costs the city is dealing with as part of the casinos’ success. “Despair, depression, bankruptcy.... All those things are negative fallouts of casinos,” he said.

Locals received an unsettling lesson two years ago when an off-duty police officer ended a losing streak at a MotorCity Casino blackjack table by shooting himself in the head.

Since then, Gamblers Anonymous groups here have multiplied. The state’s Gaming Control Board has signed up 155 gaming addicts who agree to a lifetime casino ban or face prison.

Less dramatic anecdotes abound about how casino gambling is gobbling up the paychecks of the working poor, leading to multiple home refinancings, foreclosures and unpaid bills. Surveying the frantic Greektown Casino crowd one recent night, a local surgeon saw the evidence in the crumpled bills crossing the blackjack tables.

“When you see them taking money out of their pockets and it is wadded up, it isn’t money they intended to bet,” said the surgeon, who asked not to be identified. “I think it’s the worst thing that could happen to the city of Detroit.”

The city’s love-hate relationship with gaming goes back decades. Since 1976, voters had steadfastly refused to allow casino gambling in the urban area.

That changed in 1996, when Michiganders barely approved a statewide casino measure after watching residents stampede across the river to gamble at a Windsor casino.

“People saw the world wasn’t going to end,” said Jack C. Barthwell III of the MotorCity Casino. “When they saw the lines going across the bridge and tunnel, they kind of said, ‘Well, it’s here....’”

Resignation morphed into excitement when the MGM Grand Detroit opened in 1999 in an abandoned Internal Revenue Service building. A few months later, the MotorCity debuted in an old Wonder Bread factory. In 2000, Greektown opened in a building used by fur trappers in the mid-1800s.

The casinos have tapped the wealth of surrounding suburbs and drawn well-heeled seniors living as far away as Toledo, Ohio.

But what has kept them humming around the clock are the factory workers. Many show up in work clothes, like Bill, 39, a single father of three. Eyeing the craps table at the MGM Grand Detroit, Bill, who didn’t want his last name used, said he hits the casinos twice a week after his shift at the Ford truck plant ends at 2:30 p.m.

“As soon as I get off work, I come down here for a couple of hours and then I pick up my kids,” he said. He became a casino regular a year ago after his wife left him. “It helps get my mind off stuff,” he said.

Rudy Pritchett, the crane operator, used to wear a United Auto Workers hat on the casino floors, where he and his wife spent about 4% of their combined $151,000 annual salary on slot machines such as the “Sizzling Sevens.”

Then they had an epiphany. “We had it to spend, but it doesn’t make sense going there and spending it,” said Pritchett. The couple is now saving the money to buy retirement property in Alabama.

The casinos have picked up new customers since the terrorist attacks. Memories of long border waits continue to deter players such as 56-year-old Regina Love from gambling in Windsor.

Love, a retired elementary school teacher, used to gamble in Canadian bingo halls five times a week until cab drivers on both sides of the border refused such fares. Now she plays nickel slots in Detroit three times a week. The cost: about 25% of her monthly pension check.

“I like the idea now that you can come out of your house late at night and have somewhere to go,” Love said.

Despite the new revenues from the casinos, civic bliss remains elusive in Detroit. Officials are worried about a recent federal appeals court ruling that the way they awarded the gaming franchises violated the constitutional rights of Michigan’s smallest Indian tribe, the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewas. A judge is considering the tribe’s request that one or more of the franchises be rebid.

City officials are also fighting over how much to demand from the casinos. Besides $81.6 million in annual state taxes, the gaming houses pay the nearly $113 million yearly--enough to reduce the corporate income tax.

Now some want even more, taking issue with the mayor’s plan to let the casinos out of an earlier pact to move to the riverfront and build 2,400 luxury hotel rooms. Kilpatrick has proposed allowing the casinos to stay put and build half the number of hotel rooms. In return, the casinos will give the city a $102-million gift and riverfront land worth $150 million.

On May 31, however, council members voted to veto the plan, 6 to 3, making good on their threat to block casino development unless the gaming houses fork over tens of millions of dollars more. They’ve drawn up a wish list: creating a minority business development fund, renovating city recreation centers and paying college tuition for every public school kid.

Council members’ demands are based on reports that casinos here make annual returns of 63%, nearly four times the gaming industry average, said Council President Maryann Mahaffey. She said they also reflect a growing grass-roots disenchantment, one in which people want to see more for the money they’re losing.

“When I go around to block clubs and community councils, what I hear regularly is ‘Stick to your guns,’” said Mahaffey, who has pushed for more casino concessions. “ ‘We know how much money they’re taking out of the city. They owe us more.’”