The city near where I live was hit bad by outsourcing…it was a manufacturing town back in the 80s. A few years back they brought in a giant Casino with promises of making it a tourist destination. Predictably, nobody wants to come to a town that’s an armpit…so most of the gamblers are locals.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 points 5 days ago

Yeah, unless you can succeed in turning your city into the next Vegas or Macau, gambling is pretty much all negatives. We're at a point here where I honestly wish the giant casino was the only problem we have with gambling. And the casino itself is a big enough problem even aside from app-based sports betting and ads for that. Our huge new casino opened up a year or two ago. It has its own bridge that funnels people directly from the extremely popular pedestrianised tourist/cultural area on one side of the river (if you happen to be a parent of a child who's watched a lot of Bluey, you'd recognise Southbank from its appearances in that show, though I don't know if they call it by that name) into the casino's landing area. And they've been allowed to degrade the major riverside bike path, the city's busiest commuter route for cyclists, into a shared path and plaza, with even further degradations regularly when they use (sorry "activate") the area to run commercial events. So the casino is allowed to significantly degrade the entire area even for people who never have anything to do with them.