The Casinos Come to the Coast
Near Biloxi Gulfport, Mississippi
In August of nineteen ninety, Mississippi became the third state in the country, after Nevada and New Jersey, to legalize casino gambling. The legislation was specific about geography: casinos had to be on water, either on the Gulf Coast or on the Mississippi River. The Gulf Coast counties were given the option to hold local referenda, and several of them voted yes within the following year.
The first casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast opened in nineteen ninety-two. By the mid-nineteen nineties, a string of large floating casinos, technically dockside or on barges to satisfy the on-water requirement, had been moored along Highway Ninety between Biloxi and Gulfport. The names came from everywhere: the Grand, the Palace, the Isle of Capri, the Treasure Bay, the Beau Rivage. The Beau Rivage, a MGM Mirage property that opened in nineteen ninety-nine, was the largest hotel in Mississippi when it opened: a high-rise resort built directly on the beachfront with more than seventeen hundred rooms.
The economic transformation was rapid and significant. Harrison County, which contains Biloxi and Gulfport, went from a regional economy built on seafood, the military, and modest tourism to one of the top gaming markets in the United States within a decade. Tax revenue from gambling funded local schools and public services at levels the pre-casino economy had never reached. Employment in hospitality and gaming replaced much of what the declining seafood industry had offered.
The social costs that follow large-scale gambling operations, including problem gambling, personal debt, and associated crime, came with the industry. Documentation of those costs in the Mississippi Gulf Coast context exists in social services records and academic literature but is not well synthesized in the publicly available sources here.
Hurricane Katrina in two thousand five damaged or destroyed most of the coastal casino facilities. Mississippi responded by changing the law to allow land-based casinos, dropping the on-water requirement. When the industry rebuilt, it rebuilt on land, with the hotel towers set back from the beach.
