:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23367282/blasio_cohen.jpg)
Steve Cohen, who bought the team for $2.4 billion in the fall of 2020, hosted Mayor Eric Adams and other top City Hall officials at Citi Field this January, where he and others presented ideas for Willets Point, the 61-acre piece of land across the street, THE CITY has learned.
Portions of the neighborhood — known for its hamlet of auto-body shops and junkyards and decades of failed redevelopment plans — are currently getting an environmental clean-up as part of a plan from 2013.
The effort is expected to bring 1,100 affordable apartments and a new school by the end of the decade. Of the 61 acres of land, 23 acres are currently owned by the city. The rest of the land is privately owned.
Cohen’s alleged desire for a casino near Citi Field first made headlines last fall, and it was reported in February that casino operators were eyeing the Flushing ballpark as one of a handful of sites in New York City where they’d like to add slot machines.
In the meeting with top city officials, Cohen discussed potential support for a casino in Citi Field’s parking lot, officials told THE CITY. Cohen’s people also discussed broader plans to beautify the area around the stadium, including potentially adding hiking trails along Flushing Creek.
“For decades, New Yorkers have known that our city can get more out of the area around Citi Field,” Tiffany Galvin-Cohen, a (unrelated) spokesperson for Cohen, said in a statement on Tuesday.
9 comments:
Moe said...
Gambling is a Sin tax specifically deemed harmful to society and weak minded individuals, such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, candies, soft drinks, fast foods, coffee, sugar, and pornography.
This should be criticized for burdening the poor and for taxing the mentally dependent who need to get help.
They said they were going to use the land for housing when they kicked out all the auto repair shops and junkyards and destroyed hundreds of businesses and thousands of livelihoods.
Now they want to use it for a casino?!
I have a great idea for Sawthoot Hochul. If the state of NY can build a stadium in Buffalo for one billionaire why not build a casino for another billionaire. Spread the hard earned taxpayer money around the state. Maybe her husband can get the food concession at the casino too.
This whole state is a fucking joke. With all the problems this state has nothing like pissing away money it doesn't have. The Covid money will run out soon.
It's smart business. Flushing is basically China and Korea, and Chinese and Koreans love gambling, especially Chinese. And they're flush with cash, great gobs of it of course unreported. Taxes are for suckers, not for savvy Asian businessmen who can always skip back to their homelands if they get caught.
So by having a casino, some of that cash can at least get taxed both as casino earnings and when the savvy Asian businessmen win.
Remember way back when casinos used to be considered pits of moral degeneracy that brought in "the wrong element"? Ahh, screw that, all we care about now is money, money, money. So sure, why not, have a casino. I don't go anywhere near Flushing anyway, so what do I care. Though I'm old enough to remember when it was a nice, white neighborhood.
Gambling is, and always has been, regressive and cannibalistic. It's regressive because the gambler is almost always playing with money that he/she doesn't have, which means a missed car payment, late or skipped mortgage payment, etc., and it's cannibalistic because once the money evaporates (and it always does), then the gambler becomes desperate to gamble away (read, steal) other people's money (i.e., spouse's paycheck, child's college fund, general savings).
But, New York State politicians are addicted to the same corruption that carries them to full term (in their vastly overpaid and totally useless, taxpayer funded positions) by regurgitating all previously pitched gambling models IN LIEU of an actual plan to employ a workforce without relying on casinos to provide jobs for the proletariat, when gambling itself as a model for a healthy economy has never worked to solve the jobs issue——only to burden the the remnants of a shabby, collapsing modern society, to the deepest wells of beggary, obscurity and quiet desperation, and almost always at the expense of those who can least afford to gamble——the feckless and mentally lazy politicians, all of whom pay no price for being wrong, and who often get rewarded for their sociopathy, ironically always with other people's money——OURS!
❝It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.❞ ——Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti! At long last!
The Quotation Drone can come up with a few good points now and again. Well said, he/she/it Drone.
Why would a casino be a better use of the land than the auto repair shops? What exactly is the problem with long-term useful businesses staying where they are? The Mets have always acted like something terrible will happen if their suburban fans go to see the Mets, and "Oh my God! there's a used auto parts dealer!"
To second Anonymous from bottom: You're a simple life form, a public fool who failed at something in life so miserably, that such a venomous, envious creature has run out of options except to mock and lampoon people of actual achievement like ME, who regularly meets with publicly electeds in City Hall, Borough Hall and beyond, while he/she/it languishes in a dead end job that forces them to live in abject squalor in QUEENS County: The world's overflooding cesspool. Keep flapping your blubbery lips, philistine. Your green with envy skin color can be seen from outer space!
Post a Comment