UMass Amherst Researchers Assess the Impacts of State’s Casinos on Commercial Real Estate Conditions in Everett, Springfield and Plainville

AMHERST, Mass. – The Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts (SEIGMA) research team at UMass Amherst continues to examine the impacts of the state’s casinos on commercial real estate conditions. The most recent report, covering the years 2010 to 2020, describes real estate conditions in the host and surrounding communities that are home to the Commonwealth’s three casinos: Plainridge Park Casino, MGM Springfield and Encore Boston Harbor.

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Overall, the findings indicate that the expansion of gambling in Massachusetts has not had a dramatic effect on the local commercial real estate markets:

• While commercial real estate conditions in the host and surrounding communities have shifted over time, many of these shifts are in line with changes observed regionally or statewide.
   
• The study period corresponds with a period of strong economic growth in the Commonwealth in general, and in the Greater Boston region in particular, so while there are many indicators of growth in the commercial real estate market, it is difficult to attribute many of those to the casinos.

See the full report

Recent findings were released Thursday morning, Oct. 21, during an open public meeting of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. These findings follow baseline reports that examined housing and real estate conditions in host cities prior to the announcement of the respective licenses. Casino proponents and critics, respectively, have argued about the potential impact of casinos on their communities.

Mark Melnik, who leads the SEIGMA economic team at the UMass Donahue Institute, comments on the importance of understanding how casino developments and other aspects of economic development are impacting housing and real estate conditions in host and surrounding communities:

“This study highlights that while casinos in the state likely have helped to strengthen local real estate markets, the casinos also developed alongside broader robust economic recovery following the Great Recession in Massachusetts. In that, commercial real estate markets have tended to be strong in all three host communities, but we do not see any dramatic divergences from the statewide trend. That said, there are important differences in real estate conditions between host communities.”

SEIGMA principal investigator Rachel Volberg, research professor in the UMass Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences, adds:

”Socioeconomic impact studies of gambling are often unbalanced in the sense of assessing the benefits that are most easily quantifiable while ignoring the more difficult impacts that are often social in nature, such as problem gambling and crime. The SEIGMA research team is tasked with studying both the economic and the social impacts of casino gambling in Massachusetts. While this report focuses on the mostly quantifiable commercial real estate trends in the casino host and surrounding communities, it also informs the work that the team is doing to understand the less quantifiable impacts of the casinos in these communities.”