Gambling with Biloxi.

• Author: Shorrock, Tim
• Position: KATRINA, TWO YEARS LATER - Essay

You can still see the devastation as you approach Biloxi from the east on U.S. Highway 90. The drive takes your breath away: All the homes, museums, and motels that used to line Beach Drive are gone. Only cement slabs remain. A few of the oak trees along the route survived, however, and between them you can see the FEMA trailers where more than 30,000 survivors still live.

Then you see it, towering above the desolation: the spectacularly garish Beau Rivage Resort and Casino, a subsidiary of MGM Mirage and one of the largest casinos in the United States. Badly damaged during Katrina, it was quickly rebuilt in time for Labor Day in 2006 for $550 million. It has thirty-two stories, spacious restaurants, big-time Southern entertainment, and a spa. It is one of seven casinos that have reopened in Biloxi since Katrina. While residents scramble to find the resources to rebuild, the casinos are drawing in thousands of gamblers from surrounding states like Georgia and Texas. These visitors don't even have to see the wreckage of the town; from Interstate 10 they can drive straight into the Beau's parking lot on I-110, a state-subsidized thruway that ends one block from the casino. The Hard Rock casino, next door to the Beau, just opened in early July. Plans are in the works for twenty more casinos in the next ten years.

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The casinos began their push immediately after the storm. Less than eight weeks after Katrina, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour called the state legislature back for an extraordinary session. It passed a new law that allowed casinos to be built on land as long as they were within 800 feet of the coast. The gambling industry had long sought this legislation. Instantly, every piece of land within a mile of Mississippi's coast became a hot commodity. Developers and promoters, sensing potential gold in real estate and retail deals, promised new investments of $20 billion to $30 billion in the area compared to the $3 billion to $6 billion planned before Katrina. Casino interests believe Biloxi will be a $4 billion gaming market by 2010.

This vision, however, has no place for most of the survivors in the eastern end of Biloxi, a mixed neighborhood of Vietnamese, Anglos and African Americans that is often compared to New Orleans' Ninth Ward in terms of its ethnicity and diversity. Their land near the coastline is the area most coveted by the casino and real estate interests.

"This is all about the money," says Bill...