You have to picture that an aging resort town with a long history as a family place like Atlantic City doesn't just decide to build casinos overnight. When built, it would change AC from a place that died 6 months of the year to a place with a year-round income stream.
The wrangling over it took years, and required laws to be passed even to allow casino gambling in New Jersey. The casinos employed hundreds as dealers, waitstaff, bartenders, valets, cleaners. security, accountants, bursars, musicians, florists, chefs and cooks, technicians, engineers, on and on. People commuted from Philly and New York to work there.
The lady had plenty of advance notice to read the writing on the wall and develop Plan B; but we all know people who are just self-destructively stubborn and greedy on top of it, with a nice thick coating of moral superiorty and self-righteousness. We see a few in both the Cruz and Trump camps. She tried to get over on all the thousands of people involved in this situation, and she blew it.
Personally, I think gambling is horrible and addictive and a waste of people's money; but the town thought it would save their bacon, and the decisions were made by the entire city council and a raft of state officials, not just the developer.
If your town over a period of years had decided to build a huge entertainment complex next to your block and then began construction for another long period and finally it opened, would you suddenly think it's a big surprise that limousines are crawling around trying to parallell park on your residential street? Or would you expect that the complex should build its own damn limo parking spaces? Oh, except for that lady, wasting taxpayer dollars holding up a process that was years in development involving hundreds of people, not just the builder, Donald Trump.
IIRC, Trump was going through his divorce around that time and if you want my opinion, he was the fall guy for all the local officials that didn't want the blame -- so they let his outsider status and notoriety take the headlines. But it's ludicrous to think he went into another state and just did this on his own to a poor little old lady. It doesn't work that way.
get off my lawn :)