Casinos Boom in Katrina’s Wake as Cash Pours In

[keokuk]

New York Times.

BILOXI, Miss. — This seaside gambling resort along a stretch of the Gulf Coast, sometimes called the “redneck Riviera,” has 40 percent fewer hotel rooms and only two-thirds as many slot machines as it did before Hurricane Katrina. A major bridge that connects the casinos in this popular tourist destination to Alabama, the Florida Panhandle and other points east remains closed, and Mayor A. J. Holloway estimates that as many as 15 percent of the city’s pre-Katrina residents still have not returned.

Yet business in the gambling halls of Biloxi has reached all-time highs in recent months, so much so that Larry Gregory, the executive director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission, has half-jokingly barred his staff from uttering the phrase “record-setting” because “it was becoming too redundant.”

A similar story has been unfolding in New Orleans, where tourism is still in the doldrums and only 60 percent of the pre-Katrina population has returned nearly two years after the hurricane and flooding devastated the area.

Indeed, the casinos there seem to be faring even better than their Gulf Coast cousins.