The folks at Paragon Gaming, who want to build a new mega-casino on the hind end of BC Place Stadium, like to point out that they aren’t exactly new to the neighbourhood.
This happens to be true. Since 2006, they’ve owned and operated the Edgewater Casino, smack up against False Creek and poised between the edges of Yaletown and Strathcona. The Edgewater generates 1.5 million visits a year, and
Now Paragon wants new digs to complement the newly re-roofed BC Place Stadium. Maybe you’ve heard. The war drums of a growing anti-casino movement have been getting pretty loud of late.
This new site, as Paragon also likes to argue, is on BC Place land the City of Vancouver has long identified as suitable for entertainment uses. This also happens to be true.
But the problem, the anti-casino faction says, isn’t the location. It’s the scale. Two hotels. A huge casino floor. Fifteen hundreds slots. Las Vegas North. An unseemly use of public space in the downtown of The Most Livable City in The World.
After a slow start, the anti-casino movement started to gain traction, and press. It is fairly safe to say that, at present, it’s gained the momentum, much to the surprise of Paragon. A growing number of sympathizers, many of them prominent citizens, are lining up against the new casino.
Alarmed, Paragon, the B.C. Lottery Corp. and PavCo, the Crown corporation that chose Paragon for the casino development, called a press conference on Tuesday. It was to be a counter-offensive to the inroads made by the anti-casino faction.
It was at that press conference that BCLC president Michael Graydon said the new casino would generate an estimated 762,000 visits per year.
Which was wrong.
Graydon was a little off in his estimate, a mistake he admitted to the next day.
The actual estimated number is 2.2 million gambling visits per year.
That works out to just over 6,000 visits per day.
That’s an increase of 740,000 visits per year over the Edgewater’s present levels. And that’s not including the estimate of 181,000 hotel visits annually to the two hotels bookending the casino.
That’s a lot of traffic, foot, car or otherwise. And given the all-day-sucker nature of the casino’s operations, that traffic would be 24 hours a day in a highly visible part of the city.
The question is — and it’s a question no one really has an answer to yet — how will such an increase affect residential life downtown?
It depends on how you care to look at it.
On the one hand, Yaletown is a downtown neighbourhood that has always been filled with commerce and traffic. It isn’t a suburb. It has a noisy and energetic nightlife. If you live downtown, it might be a little late in the day to complain about the noise, or the existence of gambling in it.
On the other hand, Yaletown, and increasingly Strathcona, are showcase neighbourhoods the City of Vancouver’s planners and councils have lovingly massaged into shape over three decades. Their efforts regenerated and repopulated a tired downtown. Those neighbourhoods now embody our vision of The Most Livable City in The World.
Should a destination mega-casino and hotel complex be part of that vision?
In separate votes, the Yaletown and Strathcona neighbourhood resident associations have both declared no, they shouldn’t.
In response, Paragon, PavCo and BCLC argue that the casino will be largely self-contained, that its 1,200-stall parking garage is underground, that the casino and hotel complex will be connected internally to BC Place Stadium so patrons will not have to go out on the street and that the complex’s street-level floor will offer neighbourhood amenities like a bakery and storefronts for small businesses.
There is in these arguments an air of panic. Suddenly, Paragon, PavCo and BCLC are having to justify themselves.
A year ago, that wasn’t the case. The announcement of the BC Place/casino deal was met more with resignation than rage. Ho hum. A Liberal government with an edifice complex and a jones for gambling revenue. What else is new?
Now, there’s the sound of drums, and the natives are restless.
Gonna be a war.
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