All of this has happened before and will happen again. From 2013. The various bold and red is mine.
Now I don’t know about you but I am 100% of parkland being converted to a casino, even if the parkland is currently a parking lot anyway. The land should belong to the people, and a casino only makes the rich richer. The below is from CityLimits.org in 2013 and is not discussing the current “Steve wants to build a casino” story that came out yesterday with few details.
In describing “the creation of a world-class casino, hotel, retail, and entertainment destination,” the pitch submitted by Related, Sterling, and Triple M Development ignored the project guidelines laid out in the city’s Request for Proposals, acknowledging, “[O]ur development concept departs from the programming components of the City’s master plan.” Gone was the affordable housing that sold the Bloomberg administration’s Willets Point initiative to the City Council back in 2008—in fact, the 270-page proposal contained no housing at all.
Most of the development would have taken place on parkland west of CitiField, with practically all of Willets Point getting paved over for surface parking lots. The developers said this strategy offered the “significant advantage” of “minimizing” the necessary costs to clean up polluted land on Willets Point and also avoided the building of basic infrastructure.
Their plan included the 900,000-square-foot casino; a 1.8 million-square-foot shopping mall with department stores, movie theaters, and bowling alleys; and a 500-room “premium” hotel, with restaurants, bars, and ballrooms. Renderings prominently featured the hotel’s Flash Gordon-like tower, which would put a rooftop “pool club” on stems rising above the building. Millions would visit each year, the bid predicted.
The developers’ own attorneys noted that since the CitiField parking lot is on Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, that piece of the park will have to first be alienated by the state Legislature, then approved by the governor, with the lost parkland replaced either with new acreage or capital improvements to existing parks. This same hurdle would confront the current shopping mall plan, though the Bloomberg administration denies that alienation legislation will be needed to build the shopping mall on parkland.
