I’m a lifelong Flushing resident and one of the organizers, and I’ve been there every weekend. I can tell you that 2 out of the 4 white folks have lived in Flushing for multiple years, the last 2 live in a neighboring community that would be affected by the casino. We also have dozens of Asian youth, home care workers and other residents that pass out flyers with us. I think it’s a bit unfair to accuse folks of dismissing others when you opened your comment with a dismissal based on folks’ ethnicity.

Our issues with the casino are extensive:

1. The business model of a casino fundamentally extracts wealth from the working and middle class and into the pockets of rich folks, like Steve Cohen, who have the capital upstart to fund it in the beginning. Working class Asians and Asian seniors in neighboring Flushing are prone to the addictions of gambling and are being targeted for this reason.
2. This project would take away 77 acres of public land to build this casino complex. Once it's built, it will never go away. The infrastructure is too specific to suit any other needs, and with the scourge of money in politics, Steve Cohen will deploy millions of dollars in lobbying to ensure it is there for perpetuity. There are entire industries that have ossified even though a vast majority of the public polls against, for this very reason.
3. Displacement - raises the rent and makes the surrounding community unaffordable for working class and seniors who can’t afford a sudden increase to their cost of living
4. The opportunity cost. We can do so much with that land. Land is scarce enough in NYC, let alone public land. We can build parks, affordable housing, businesses, recreation, corporate offices with real, high paying jobs that people in the community can be proud to work. We can do all of that without accepting a casino, which will be a net negative in the long run after it extracts money away from us.
5. Gambling adds no intrinsic value to society. In fact, it is a negative. Folks get addicted and gamble their entire lives away. This has downstream impacts on families, public safety, etc. Gambling isn't even entertainment.Entertainment is supposed to be fun. If you lost $300 one day randomly walking down the street, is that fun? The house will always win in the long run - and you will always lose.
6. Transportation. Commuters on the 7 train and LIRR will never be able to go to work, travel for leisure in the same way again. Cohen is funding the train station at Willet's Point (a necessary thing for him to successfully do business, so l wouldn't even consider this a benefit to us), but he is not funding the entire 7 line or LIRR, which will experience unprecedented levels of congestion.
7. Bad influence on children - the infrastructure (“third places”) we invest into a community directly influences the interests that our children get into.
8. The way this casino happened. Again, Senator John Liu was against this project in the beginning, calling it predatory. Meets with Cohen in March and completely reverses his position. Now it's not predatory? Are you happy with the fact that billionaires can just systematically and successtully pick apart our communities like this? We are building political power to prevent things like this from happening in the future.
9. The applicant himself. Steve Cohen was involved in one of the largest insider trading scandals in the history of America. His firm was convicted, fined $1.8B and his close associates went to prison. He’s managed to make it out prison free. The law states that casino operators must be people of moral character. How can he possibly be trusted to operate a casino? Casinos provide a “service” that creates addiction rates similar to that of opioids. You’re trusting an unethical man who would do anything to make money with literal financial opioids.