The Racino Problem: Two Businesses Under One Roof

The racino is the least glamorous building type in this archive and one of the most instructive, because it makes visible a problem every casino has and most can hide: two different customers wanting two different buildings at the same time.

Why there are so many

Spurred to Success sets out the scale: with 44 racetrack casinos in 12 states seeing double-digit growth despite an economic slump, half a dozen states in the U.S. are now considering these hybrid operations, which are also multiplying in Canada.

The reason is legislative. Racing has a licence, an existing site, a constituency and a revenue problem; gaming has revenue and needs a licence. Golden Age Redux? tracks the pattern state by state — Ohio's first racino at Scioto Downs, and in New York Genting's Resorts World at Aqueduct quickly became the nation's leading revenue producer with nearly 5,000 slot machines at a racetrack that has been struggling for years.

That last sentence contains the whole economics: the struggling asset and the top performer are the same address.

Two entrances, and why

The single most concrete planning consequence in the archive is in Spurred to Success, on Oaklawn: Shared space is accessed from two different entryways for two different sets of patrons — a necessity, as the legal age to gamble in Arkansas is 21, and racing for many in the state is a family affair.

A family day at the races and a 21-plus gaming floor cannot share a front door. Everything else follows: two arrival sequences, two circulation systems that touch only where supervision allows, and a shared food and beverage offer that has to be reachable from both without breaching the boundary.

The existing building is usually wrong

Grandstands were built for crowds that arrive at once, sit facing one direction and leave at once. Casinos are built for continuous, low-density, wandering occupation. Converting one to the other is the archive's recurring difficulty, and the answers are pragmatic. Oaklawn began by equipping two small rooms under its grandstand with 50 electronic "historic racing" games, and later added up to 1,100 total gaming positions, a buffet and restaurant, and a poker room in a total of 90,000 square feet, with a buffet, kitchen and other amenities… tucked under the grandstand.

Tucked under the grandstand is a design decision made by a structure someone else drew in another era. The cost discipline it forces is exactly the discipline The $50 Million Budget recommends: find non-revenue space and make it earn. See renovation is the industry's real business.

Continuity is the design problem

Where the two halves meet, the building has to stop looking like two buildings. Spurred to Success names both the objective — it was one of our main objectives to make the racing and gaming somewhat seamless — and the technique: we continue strong planes or elements in the ceiling, repeating them from the old space to the new. See the ceiling is doing the wayfinding.

Note also what was deliberately not made seamless: finishes. In the grandstand, it doesn't pay to spend a whole lot of money to renovate; in the casino, finishes had to be lustrous. Utilisation decides the specification, not adjacency.

The purpose-built racino, and what it aims at

Where the site is new, the ambition changes. Hometown Racino describes Miami Valley Gaming in Lebanon, Ohio, developed on 130 acres… while located in a simple square building, which nevertheless gives off vibes of something rich and exciting, but also comfortable, so that people are starting to identify it as their 'hometown' casino.

A simple square building doing that is a better result than most resorts manage, and it is a design brief a regional operator can actually afford. The same story credits the method to the team structure: All three of us, including the construction manager, worked with the goal of getting the property open. See design-build, and why casinos kept choosing it.

Urban racinos are a third case

Spurred to Success flagged Aqueduct in 2009 as the most prominent racino project in the pipeline today; located in Queens borough, it would be the first casino smack-dab in the middle of New York City. A decade later, Aqueduct Adventure reports the result — due to that favorable location, the property has quickly become the top slot machine performer in the nation — in a building of 1,086,000 square feet of which 180,000 is casino.

In a city, the racino is a transit-fed local casino that happens to have a racetrack attached. The track is the licence; the catchment is the business.

Four questions for a racino brief

1. What are the two legal ages, and where is the boundary between them drawn on plan?
2. Which half is seasonal, and what does the other half do on a peak race day?
3. Can the grandstand structure take a gaming floor, and at what floor-to-floor height?
4. Which shared amenities — food, parking, toilets — serve both, and how do they get there without crossing the boundary?