Four contenders remain in the running for three casino licenses that New York State could award before the end of the year, paving the way for the first full-scale gambling house in the New York City region.
It would be the realization of a long-held dream of the gambling industry to break into the largest metropolitan area in the United States, a global tourism destination that has just about everything except Las Vegas-style table games and slots.
The remaining casino proposals include one in the Bronx, two in Queens and another in Yonkers. They survived the first round of cuts last month, when committees evaluating local support for the proposals approved them but rejected four others, including three in Manhattan and another on Coney Island in Brooklyn.
The lengthy application process dates back to 2013, when New York voters approved the legalization of public casinos. The state’s first four casinos opened in the following years, all of them outside New York City, giving them a head start on future competition from the city.
That future is almost here. The next stop for the four applicants is the state’s Gaming Facility Location Board and then, for those still remaining, New York’s Gaming Commission.
Here is what they will face in the coming months and how their plans compare with each other.
Meet the contenders.
Of the four remaining casino applicants, two are already operating as so-called racinos.
They are Resorts World in Queens near Kennedy International Airport and Empire City Casino by MGM Resorts in Yonkers, just north of New York City. Both offer horse racing and betting, with tracks that opened in the late 1800s, and video gambling machines but no live tables. Until recently, casinos offering that hybrid style of gambling had been the only type allowed in the state.
Resorts World is operated by the Genting Group, a Malaysian conglomerate that has casinos around the world, including in the Catskills. Empire City is run by another gambling giant, MGM Resorts. It bought the Yonkers property in 2019.
The other two sites would be built from scratch.
In the Bronx, a Bally’s casino would rise on the property of the company’s 222-acre public golf course next to the Whitestone Bridge. Bally’s has casinos across the country.
A few miles south, the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Metropolitan Park would be constructed on parking lots next to Citi Field, the home ballpark of the New York Mets. The bid is backed by the team’s billionaire owner, Steven A. Cohen.
The four full-scale casinos currently operating in New York State are spread apart, all of them more than 100 miles from one another. The four under consideration now are, depending on traffic, a short drive from one another.
Kevin S. Law, the chairman of the Gaming Facility Location Board when the first four were approved a decade ago, said he believed that three casinos in and around the city could do well despite their close proximity.
“Just walk down the streets of Vegas, there are numerous casinos right on top of each other,” Mr. Law said. “Our downstate and tristate population is huge and should be able to support three casinos.”
What are they promising?
The bids from all four applicants are filled with big numbers. Many billions in investments. Millions in community investments. Thousands of jobs created.
Those promises have won over powerful unions in the construction and hospitality industries, whose workers would be employed at the sites.
But if urban casinos elsewhere in the United States are any gauge, the economic windfalls are often overstated and decline over time. As mobile sports betting has surged, casinos across the country have reported decreasing gambling revenues, including year-over-year declines on the Las Vegas Strip and in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Resorts World in Queens, the top grossing video gambling house in the country, said that as a full-scale casino, it could more than double its annual revenue to $2.2 billion. It would spend $5.5 billion on expanding its current property, adding a 2,000-room hotel, thousands of slot machines and 5,000 jobs.
Empire City Casino said it would spend $1.8 billion on an expansion that could push revenues up to $1.4 billion. Supporters of the proposal have argued that without a casino license, Empire City could not compete as a racino with a Las Vegas-style site nearby.
Bally’s has proposed a 250-foot-tall casino and resort in the Bronx with thousands of gambling machines and hundreds of live tables. The project would cost $4 billion. The company claims that it could collect more than $1 billion in gambling revenue.
The Hard Rock project has the largest price tag: $6.4 billion to build a 1,000-room hotel and a casino with hundreds of live tables, including 30 for poker. It has also claimed the largest annual revenue of the four remaining proposals, $3.9 billion.
Community opposition knocked out four other bids.
Not long ago, there were eight bids vying for the three licenses. But half of them could not get over the first hurdle: approval by community advisory committees, which are sensitive to local support for the proposals.
Among the three proposed Manhattan casinos, the Caesars Palace in Times Square, faced particularly fierce local resistance. Led by the Broadway League, an industry trade organization, a group called No Times Square Casino helped defeat that bid with a campaign warning that the casino could steal business from local theaters and restaurants.
Similar concerns from business owners on Coney Island led to the defeat of the project there, the Coney. And back in Manhattan, residents and neighborhood groups said they were worried about the effects of the other two proposed casinos — the Avenir on the Far West Side and Freedom Plaza near the United Nations headquarters — on traffic congestion and public safety.
Residents also spoke out against the Hard Rock casino proposal; the last public hearing grew so intense that it had to be shut down. But members of that committee were not swayed and unanimously approved it. Committee representatives spoke glowingly about the applications from Resorts World and MGM Resorts. One representative on the Bally’s committee voted against it, saying the project did not represent the type of economic investment that the Bronx needed, but the committee ultimately approved the project.
What happens next?
The five-member Gaming Facility Location Board will pore over the remaining applications and grade them on four categories.
The most important, worth 70 percent of the overall evaluation, is the project’s potential economic benefit, including the total investment on the development and its potential tax revenue. The other three categories are the effects on the neighborhood, including on traffic and small businesses; the proposal’s work force plans, a category that also includes the casino’s efforts to help gambling addicts; and the diversity of its employment, including the contractors hired during construction.
Each member on the board has a specific expertise — real estate or finance or economics. And the panel is led by Vicki L. Been, a former deputy mayor in New York City under Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Mr. Law, the former board chairman, said he had been most focused on whether a casino could create good jobs and attract visitors to the area, especially one in need of an economic jolt.
“We looked at the economic impact to the region as the most important criteria as well as the track record of the casino operators,” he said.
The board could approve all of the applicants, some or none. In 2014, it considered 16 bids and recommended just three. The next year, it approved the only application before it.
The final stage in the application process is the Gaming Commission, which has up to three licenses to award. The recipients get to open a casino and owe the state a $500 million licensing fee.
Matthew Haag is a Times reporter covering the New York City economy and the intersection of real estate and politics in the region.
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