Week 8: Lit Review - Camille

When I thought about reading and blogging for this Lit Review, I immediately started thinking about what, in Lemay (my designated community) would be interesting to delve deeper into.  My first thought was education and school district, but then I realized  how affected the place of Lemay, and subsequently the school district is due to River City Casino coming about in 2010.  After putting together the community profile for Lemay, we found that 54% of the Hancock School District funding came from River City Casino.  So, how does a casino coming into a struggling place like Lemay have an affect?

Casinos, Gambling, and Economic Development: An Introduction to the Special Issue

by Michael Wenz (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.umsl.edu/doi/10.1111/grow.12037/pdf) is an interesting peer-reviewed article in that it culminates eight other articles to discuss this exact issue - Economic Development and Casinos coming in to a community. 

Putting aside the personal implications casinos, and having such entities in one's community would have, the question of what research exists and how such research and findings affect casinos and economic development currently.  Wenz pulls from Canada's "The Social and Economic Impacts ofGambling: Final Report" which concludes there is no widely accepted framework or conclusion in terms of helping or hindering community development.  I would venture to say that while there can be positive economic implications for a community, there can also be negative social aspects for said community.

Later in that same Jornal, Wenz explores casinos in local community in

Valuing Casinos as a Local Amenity (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezproxy.umsl.edu/doi/10.1111/grow.12036/pdf)  He explores quality of life outlook of casinos, concluding that having a community-casino does very little to improve quality of life.  While Native-American casinos have proved to have economic progress, the same is not true for non-Native Amercian entities.  Metz discusses the difficulty in calculating social costs verses private costs. 

It's interesting to read a study that much of the research points to a casino such as River City in Lemay having either negative or no affect on quality of life for residents, when we see these staggering numbers in support of the school district, and revitalization efforts in the area, as a result of the casino and it's increased business to the community.  Personally, I'm not one-hundred percent sure of the findings, but suppose there is much more research to be done.  Does anyone have any thoughts  on this?  What is your take of the casino in Lemay, and it's affect on quality-of-life for community members?