Tucked away on a quiet street behind the massive Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Center, the A

And so instead of cooking in a restaurant or driving a tractor trailer for someone like he used to do, Bogan eats at a soup kitchen and sleeps on park benches or in a train or bus station each night. He s one of about 500 homeless people living in the nation s second-largest gambling market.
A state agency plans to allocate just under $100,000 to a local homeless shelter to buy bus or plane. Reducing Atlantic City s homeless population is a key element of a new effort to help the struggling casino resort get back on its feet after more than four years of plunging revenues, lost market share and layoffsickets back home for any homeless person who wants to leave.
Bogan says he lost his wallet two years ago with all his identification and personal documents. He wants to travel to Jacksonville, Fla., in order to obtain a copy of his birth certificate, the first step toward getting a driver s license and then a commercial driver s license, to enable him to work as a truck driver in or near Pompano Beach.
discount airline fares Susan Ney Thompson is acting executive director of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, the agency carrying out Gov. Chris Christie s Atlantic City rescue plan, which created a state-run tourism zone district encompassing the 11 casinos, the Boardwalk, outlet shops and downtown. She said people like Bogan literally get stranded here.
It s one of those quality-of-life issues for our visitors and frankly, our residents here who are confronted by the needy, discount airline fares she said. We re looking discount airline fares for a good way to help those people who end up stranded here get back home.
The state intervention comes amid a 4 ½- year decline for Atlantic City that began in late 2006 when the first Pennsylvania slots parlor opened and started chipping away at the resort s customer base. There are now 10.
Atlantic City has lost nearly a third of its business over the past four years, falling from $5.2 billion in revenue in 2006 to $3.6 billion in 2010. Casinos in New York and Delaware are also luring away customers, having recently added table games to compete more directly with new Jersey discount airline fares s casinos.
Tucked away on a quiet street behind the massive Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Center, the Atlantic City Rescue Mission is the last resort for most of the homeless who wind up here. They are sent here by welfare agencies from other counties or cities, are released from prison, jail or the hospital with nowhere else to go, or come to the casino mecca looking for work and fail to find it. And some come here hoping to strike it rich, lose their money and become stranded in Atlantic City.
Bill Southrey, executive discount airline fares director of the rescue mission, said 300 of the city s homeless live at his facility, an additional 100 or so are on the streets or live under the Boardwalk, and still another 100 live in other places like abandoned buildings. But his facility served nearly 3,000 people last year, not all of whom were chronically homeless. He has operated the Travelers Assistance Program for decades on a much smaller scale, with whatever funds he could carve out of his agency s budget.
That usually amounted to $25,000 to $40,000 a year, which he said will typically help a few hundred people a year get back home. The $92,000 being provided by the casino authority will let us help a lot more people, he said. One man at the mission is trying to get back home to the Philippines.
The program is strictly voluntary; no homeless discount airline fares person who wants to stay put will be forced to leave. And before anyone leaves, discount airline fares the mission will make sure there is someone back home who is willing to take them in.
Not everyone discount airline fares is upset by the presence of the homeless near the casinos. Interviews with nearly 50 tourists last week on the Boardwalk or inside casinos did not turn up a single person discount airline fares who felt bothered. Ernie Malafronte of Naugatuck, Conn., sympathizes with them.
Reconnection with family represents the kinder, gentler end of the spectrum. On the opposite end, regular sweeps by police and social service agencies under the Boardwalk and in public places will continue, possibly at a stepped-up pace, Thompson and others say.
These sweeps there were 150 last year aim to remove the homeless discount airline fares from dangerous living conditions and put them in touch with services like temporary housing and medical care. But the days when the underside of Atlantic City s Boardwalk was famously known as the Underwood Motel are over.
In September 1989, when photographers covering the Miss America pageant were looking for an iconic shot, they overturned a lifeboat on the beach as swimsuit-clad contestants smiled for the camera. But underneath the boat were two homeless men who had been sleeping on the beach. Their picture was splashed on the front page of newspapers across the country.
Some question just how helpful it is. Joseph Papa Joe Bocchino, cooks at Sister Jean s Soup Kitchen, where hundreds of homeless each day line up right across the street from the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort. It s not an image you will find on any Atlantic City postcard.
There are homeless in every city; you re not going to stop that, Bocchino said. They sleep under the Boardwalk. That s their home; you can t just erase them. You can t just put them on a bus, send them back home and forget about it. That s just moving people around, not solving the problem.
Las Vegas runs two similar programs, also aimed at getting the homeless away from the casino zones and back to where they came from. Homeless advocates reacted much the same way at first, according to Rich Penska, director of homeless services with HELP of Southern Nevada, a social service agency. But when it became clear that the agency was making contact and setting up reunions, those objections vanished, he said.
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