After The TRiiBE published a story about Bally’s Chicago Casino offering women and minority investors an opportunity to purchase equity shares in the project, many readers questioned whether it made sense to invest in the upcoming project.
Damon Jones, associate professor and economist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said the Bally’s deal is a bad investment. Jones advised against investing due to the high risks and the number of years it would take to make a return on investment.
“When people have really good investment opportunities, they don’t advertise them. They keep them to themselves,” Jones told The TRiiBE. “A general financial rule, if someone is advertising it to you, question it.”
Hank Meyer, a retired financial advisor who worked in the business for nearly 40 years, said the Bally’s investment opportunity isn’t necessarily bad, but not a good one for first-time investors.
“It is not for everybody. It shouldn’t be considered for everybody. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and it should be a compliment to some great foundation that you’ve created,” he said.
Meyer added that this kind of investment is for those who may have other low-risk investments, such as dividend-paying stocks, IRAs, 401ks and certificates of deposit.
“I would not consider an investment like [Bally’s] unless I was maximizing my 401K contribution and working on my IRA and so on. I need to take care of the basics before I do the fancy stuff,” Meyer said. “Now I would argue this [Bally’s investment] is the very top of the so-called fancy stuff. This really shouldn’t be for the average person really coming in with no knowledge of investing at all.”
Chicago’s Host Community Agreement requires Bally’s Chicago to have 25% minority and women ownership. Beginning in December, Bally’s started selling 10,000 shares at $25,000. The opportunity became attractive to low-income residents because investors can buy in with a non-recourse loan that allows people to invest as low as $250. Though the loans are paid back entirely through the dividends made, they have an 11% compounded interest; meaning each year, an additional 11% of interest is added onto the loan.
Additionally, if the casino folds or doesn’t open, investors would lose any money they invested.
The last day to invest in the casino project is Jan 31.
Jones said investment opportunities that are widely advertised or publicized are often presented to Black people as a way to get in “on the ground level.” He pointed to cryptocurrency as another space where Black people are targeted to make investments. Rarely, though, are good opportunities to invest advertised in growing lucrative spaces, he said, pointing to the weed dispensary business.
“You don’t see people offering you the ability to kind of invest in those things. Those are scooped up by big money,” Jones said, referring to the cannabis industry. “Some investment models are, ‘Come get these people and dump all the risk on them, take the money, leave them with a lot of risk.’”
City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has hosted multiple informational sessions about the deal, including one on Jan. 16 at Third Baptist Church on 95th and Ashland. There, Conyears-Ervin said, “Let’s be frank, this [casino] will affect our community, and so we ought to have a right to invest in it if we so choose to.” She added that public officials were not giving any financial advice, and advised attendees to be intentional about learning the risks involved.
“If you know anything about me and my role as treasurer, you know that my mission is to build generational wealth for our community,” she continued.
The TRiiBE later reached out to Conyears-Ervin for a comment. In an emailed statement, her office said they have no comment on the critiques of the Bally’s offer. “Our programming is tailored to showcasing the diversity of Chicago. Those initiatives include a variety of financial education programs, such as Money Mondays with Melissa, Money Mondays Live in the Community, Money Matters Institute, and Wealth Wednesdays” the statement read.
Meyer recounted his time as a financial advisor in the 1990s and Black people’s hesitancy to invest due to the lack of discretionary income in the Black community and other financial obligations, such as bills.
“Oftentimes in our community, we’re afraid to make these types of investments because we do have things to lose. Other [ethnic] communities actually encourage investment,” Meyer said.
Slavery and redlining are just a few contributing factors to the wealth gap that exists between Black and white Americans. For example, financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase built their wealth by accepting slaves as collateral for loans. This history has left the Black community without generational wealth and discretionary funds to invest. Additionally, it’s contributed to Black people’s distrust in banking systems.
Because Black people have been historically and intentionally left out of opportunities to build wealth, advertisements that use low amounts of money to create generational wealth can seem attractive.
Sidney Dillard of Loop Capital, the company that is the underwriter of Bally’s investment deal, noted that the opportunity isn’t without risk and that nobody in the Black community is pressured to invest.
“I think the important piece is that women and minorities are not obligated to participate. This is an opportunity to participate where they can choose if this works for them,” Dillard said. “And I think for folks who may feel like this isn’t for me, then you don’t have to participate in this opportunity.”
Ayanna Berry, a Chicago resident and client partner at a major tech company who is passionate about personal finance, expressed her discontent with Bally’s investment deal in an op-ed for The TRiiBE. In a follow-up interview, Berry said that presenting such investments to low-income communities is worrisome and is exploitative of people’s trust in credible people like their local public officials.
“You’re going to look to people that you assume to have badges of credibility, and then it’s going to be very easy for you to just believe everything that they are saying, especially when you’re doing it again in a community setting, under this narrative of helping create economic opportunity,” Berry said. “And so when you combine those two things, what you really are creating is this vulnerable population of people that know they want to do something and they’re looking for anybody to help teach them how.”

Berry and Jones emphasized the importance of diversified portfolios and low-fee index funds as a better way for low-income individuals to see a bigger outcome with small input.
Jones added the importance of the government’s role in creating equity and providing safety nets to address the deeper issues of such systems that resulted in generational poverty and the wealth gap.
A 2020 study by the Brookings Institute showed that “the 400 richest Americans have more total wealth than all 10 million Black American households combined.” Solutions provided in the research include progressive taxation and reparations programs to help close the racial wealth gap.
“During the middle of the 20th century, a lot of people got very cheap property and got their education subsidized, and the economy happened to be doing very well as well, and so a lot of people’s families became a more stable socioeconomic class,” Jones said. “[It] was mostly white families, but that wasn’t through financial investment or financial markets, that was a government program to build suburbs, subsidize the housing, subsidize the highways that go there [and] subsidize people’s education.”
As a business owner, Meyer acknowledges the role of the federal and local governments in producing stability and aiding the gaps that exist.
“If the government can focus on the basic things like health, education, welfare, not in terms of payment, but just making sure people are OK, things could get better,” Meyer said. “Also housing is important. These are all things that can support this whole economy, if you will, particularly the economy within our community.”
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