Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to spend more money, not less, but the city is expected to end the fiscal year on June 30. $2.2 billion in the red. The gap for next year is $10.4 billion.
In Albany, revenues are big enough for Gov. Kathy Hochul to start funding a massive child care program without new taxes, but she needs more to ramp it up and pay for other priorities like housing.
Where will they find the money?
One place could be the gambling revenues that have been used for decades to prop up the dying sports of hard and thoroughbred racing.
Such a change would meet resistance from at least two major real estate figures: Marc Holliday of SL Green and Jeff Gural of GFP Real Estate.
Holliday, a racehorse owner, has done just that chaired Board of Directors of the New York Racing Association for four years. Gural owns three harness racing tracks.
“The biggest fear our industry has is that states will stop subsidizing and use slot machines to subsidize the sport,” Gural acknowledged in a statement. op-ed written by industry critic Noah Shachtman. “Without that there is no sport.”
These types of people have political appeal; the writer noted that Holliday hosted a fundraiser for Hochul at Saratoga Race Course. But it is difficult to balance their business careers with using tax revenue to support horse racing.
Gural and Holliday are proud capitalists, as is virtually everyone else in the real estate industry – which is one reason why many industry people tried to prevent the election of the democratic socialist Mamdani.
Yes, horse racing provides thousands of jobs and still attracts fans to the biggest events. But subsidizing childcare – or some things, like repairing aging buildings – would also create jobs and make people happy. They would also probably provide better value for money.
Some investors benefit from horse racing subsidies, but grandstands do routinely empty. The public has moved on.
Many once-thriving industries have withered because people’s interests have changed. We do not subsidize bowling alleys out of nostalgia and job retention. Why horse racing? The employees are often poorly paid and treated poorly, and so are the athletes injured or killed.
Shachtman makes a strong case for letting the industry take care of itself, as we have done for so many others. Dog racing, once active in 18 states, is now only in one state: West Virginia. No government stepped in to save Blockbuster Video, the Yellow Pages, or television repair shops.
Real estate makes money, stimulates the economy and improves the lives of Americans by redeveloping outdated locations into usable locations. Gural and Holliday are now doing that with the Flatiron Building and 750 Third Avenuerespectively.
If horse racing subsidies were to disappear, developers could repurpose tracks that couldn’t survive on their own. Many people would benefit from the work and the casino revenue that would go to racing would go to a more important place.
I hear there is a housing shortage.
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