If you have been following the headlines over the past year, you’re probably aware that Atlantic City — the “Gambling Capital of the East Coast” — is in trouble. This year alone, 4 casinos shut their doors – including Revel, which only opened in 2012.

To be perfectly honest with you, gambling isn’t my thing. I’ve only been to Atlantic City once, and it was really just so that I could say I had been (it was when I used to live in Philadelphia). But I know that many people derive a lot of entertainment value out of gambling.

However, I worry when cities starting believing that a casino can fix all of their city building and economic development challenges. They are not a silver bullet. And many would argue that they cause far more harm than potential benefit. The negative socioeconomic impacts have been well documented.

In the case of Atlantic City, I suppose you could say that casinos “worked” – for awhile. But that’s because Atlantic City had a monopoly on gambling. In 1978 the city opened the first legal casino in the eastern United States. And that led to a boom in casinos and a spike in municipal revenue. But those revenues peaked in 2006 and have been on the decline ever since. 

My good friend Alex Feldman argued in a recent Next City article that Atlantic City is, quite frankly, the next Detroit. It repeated the same mistakes and now it’s going to need to go through the same painful rebuilding process:

It’s no exaggeration to say that Atlantic City is poised to become the next Detroit. In many ways, the trajectories of the two cities are similar. Both cities relied on one industry to prop up their economies — and both failed to innovate as competition increased. Similarly, both Atlantic City and Detroit failed to invest in a sense of place — casinos and factories were more successful when their customers and employees had little reason to go outside. The result: defensively built cities designed around the automobile that gave visitors little reason to stay.

And I think he’s right. The time has come to rethink Atlantic City. Onwards!

At this point, it’s well established that more and more people are favouring downtown urban centres over suburbs. Eric Jaffe from Atlantic Cities, put it this way:

"Population growth is on the rise in city centers (though total population still favors suburbs), Millennials seem less keen to drive than their parents were, urban home values are increasing faster than suburban ones. The list can and does go on."

As one Toronto columnist put it, generation Y is now keen to live in apartments the size of their childhood suburban bedrooms so that they can be closer to amenities.

So what does this mean for the suburbs?

Some believe that this means the suburbs are dead, or dying. But Leigh Gallagher, in her new book "The End of the Suburbs", argues that it’s not the end of the suburbs. It’s simply the end of the suburbs, as we know them.

That is, the suburbs, which functioned arguably quite while for a period of time, have now become a victim of their own success. They’ve become too big, to the point where they now isolate people away from their social networks and places of employment.

Gallagher believes that the future will be “urban burbs.” Burbs that are more dense, walkable and transit friendly. And I would agree. But I would add that I don’t think all suburbs will make this transition successfully. Like with anything, there will be some that pull it off and some that fail.

The car had a devastating impact on our cities and it’s not going to be easy to reverse what has been done. But we’ll need to figure it out.