Four major casino properties closed in Atlantic City over the course of 2014. The Atlantic Club closed in January. Showboat closed in August. Revel, which had opened only in 2012, closed in September. Trump Plaza closed in September as well. Together the closures represented approximately one-third of the casino employment in the city at the time and a substantial percentage of the casino-tax base that funded the city's public services.
The closures were covered extensively in the regional and national business press, with the coverage focused principally on the gaming-industry economics that drove them and on the broader competitive picture that had shifted as neighboring states expanded their gaming offerings. The coverage of what the closures meant for the year-round community in Atlantic City was less consistent. Ten years on, the implications are clearer than they were at the time, and the picture is worth looking at carefully.
The structural context of the closures
The 2014 closures were driven principally by the expansion of casino gaming in Pennsylvania and in Maryland over the preceding decade. Atlantic City had operated as the only legal casino market in the densely-populated mid-Atlantic region from the 1976 referendum through approximately 2006. The Pennsylvania casino expansion that began in the mid-2000s and that accelerated through the 2010s captured a substantial portion of the regional gaming demand that had previously traveled to Atlantic City.
The competitive shift produced gradually declining revenue across the Atlantic City casino sector through the late 2000s and early 2010s. The properties that were operating at the lower end of the market or that had financial structures that did not support the declining revenue were the first to fail. The closures of 2014 represented the working-out of that competitive shift in the form of bankruptcy filings, sale processes, and ultimately closures of the properties that the market could no longer support.
The structural picture was understood by industry analysts and by the state regulatory authorities at the time. The closures were not unexpected in the same way that, say, a sudden economic shock would be unexpected. They were the result of years of cumulative competitive pressure that had been working through the property-level financial statements until the financials reached the point where closure was the result.
The employment effect
The four closing properties had collectively employed approximately eight thousand people at the time of their closures. The employment included casino-floor staff, hotel staff, restaurant and food-service staff, maintenance staff, and the various professional and administrative roles that the properties required to operate. The workforce was overwhelmingly Atlantic City residents, with substantial commuting from the adjoining South Jersey communities as well.
The state and the city responded to the closures with several workforce-development initiatives, including expanded unemployment-insurance access, training programs for transition into other industries, and partnerships with surrounding employers to absorb workers into the regional labor market. The initiatives produced measurable but partial results. A significant portion of the displaced workforce did transition into other employment, with the absorbing industries including health care, regional transportation, and the casinos that continued to operate. A smaller but still substantial portion of the displaced workforce experienced extended unemployment or left the regional labor market entirely.
The effect on household economics in Atlantic City and the surrounding South Jersey communities was substantial. Casino employment had been the principal source of household income for many Atlantic City families for the better part of three decades by 2014, and the loss of approximately a third of that employment in a single year represented a household-economic shock that the regional labor market could absorb only partly and only over time.
The fiscal effect on the city
The casino tax base in Atlantic City had been supporting a substantial share of the city's public services for decades. The 2014 closures reduced that tax base by an amount that the city's general fund could not absorb without substantial adjustments. The state of New Jersey responded with a financial-assistance package and with subsequent legislation that altered the casino-tax structure to provide more predictable revenue at the cost of accepting reduced revenue overall.
The fiscal picture continued to deteriorate through 2015 and into 2016, with the city ultimately entering a state takeover under legislation passed in 2016 that gave the state direct control over the city's finances and over a number of the operational decisions that the city government had previously made. The takeover was controversial in the city, was extended through several iterations, and continued to affect the city's governance through the late 2010s.
The public-services effects of the fiscal pressure included reductions in city staffing, deferred maintenance on city infrastructure, and tightening on the discretionary spending that had supported various community programs. The school system operated on a different funding structure and was somewhat insulated from the immediate fiscal effects, but the broader community-services picture was substantially diminished through the years following the 2014 closures.
The neighborhood-level effect
The neighborhood-level effects of the closures were uneven across the city. The Boardwalk-adjacent areas where the closed properties had stood experienced the most-direct effects, with reduced foot traffic, vacant or partially-vacant adjacent retail, and the visible presence of the closed properties as substantial physical features of the streetscape. The Revel building, in particular, sat closed for an extended period in a state that affected the surrounding blocks substantially.
The residential neighborhoods elsewhere in the city experienced the effects principally through the household-economic channel — reduced household income for families connected to the casino industry, reduced spending in the local retail and service economy, and the broader effects of community-level economic stress. The neighborhoods showed differential resilience depending on their economic mix, with the neighborhoods more diversified across employment sectors faring somewhat better than the neighborhoods more concentrated in casino-industry employment.
The community organizations that had been operating in the affected neighborhoods responded with the resources they had, but the resources were limited and the demands on them increased substantially. The mutual-aid networks within the year-round community absorbed some of the strain. The faith-based community organizations expanded their service provision. The broader community-development infrastructure that the city has had since the 1970s and 1980s continued to operate but at a level that the demand exceeded.
What recovery has and has not looked like
Recovery from the 2014 closures has been partial and uneven. Two of the four closed properties have reopened under different ownership and different operating structures. Showboat reopened in 2016 as a non-gaming hotel, with the gaming areas converted to other uses. Revel reopened in 2018 as Ocean Casino Resort, with substantially the same physical structure but different financial backing and different operational management. Trump Plaza was demolished in 2021 and the site remains under redevelopment consideration. The Atlantic Club site has been the subject of various redevelopment proposals across the period since closure.
The casino industry overall in Atlantic City has stabilized at a level below its pre-2014 peak but with greater operational stability than the industry showed through the 2008–2014 period. The properties that continue to operate have generally adapted their business models to the smaller market that remains and have produced relatively stable employment for the workers who have continued in the industry. The picture is not the casino-employment economy of the 1990s, but it is a more durable structure than the immediately-pre-2014 picture was.
The fiscal picture for the city has stabilized to a degree as well, though the state oversight has continued in modified form and the city's underlying fiscal structure remains more dependent on state support than it was in earlier decades. The school system has continued to operate. The public-services picture has partially recovered, though the deferred maintenance and the staffing reductions of the early closure period have not been fully reversed.
What the closures revealed about the city's structure
The 2014 closures revealed several structural features of Atlantic City's economy that had been less visible during the casino-era boom. The dependence of the city's fiscal base on a single industry was greater than the diversified picture that the marketing materials had suggested. The vulnerability of casino-industry employment to regional competitive shifts was greater than had been generally appreciated. The thinness of the alternative employment infrastructure in the city was greater than the regional-economic narrative had implied.
The closures also revealed durability that had been less visible during the boom — the year-round community's capacity to absorb and adapt to economic shock, the strength of the community-organization infrastructure, and the underlying place-based identity of the city that did not depend on the casino industry for its continued meaning. The city that exists today is a smaller-economy version of the casino-era city but is recognizably continuous with the city that the casino era was layered onto.
The implications for what comes next are still being worked out. The diversification efforts that have been pursued since 2014 have produced modest but real growth in non-casino employment categories, including professional services, health care, and education. The regional connectivity to Philadelphia has been a focus of economic-development work as well. Whether those efforts produce a sufficient base for sustained growth is a question that the next decade will answer. The 2014 closures were a substantial event in the city's history. What they meant is becoming clearer as time and the recovery process work themselves out.
