“My biggest fear,” she wrote, “is that our house will collapse.”

For two decades, ever since her county of plantations and shotgun shacks had struck it rich, she’d been awaiting the prosperity. Great jobs for all, she’d imagined. Improved living standards. Perhaps no place in America’s Deep South had ever received a better chance to create new economic opportunities for its people. Starting in the early 1990s, Tunica had become a neon-lit casino destination. The county had since raked in $759 million, a fortune for a county with 10,000 people.

But as she worried about her house, Engle-Harris — like many in Tunica — was beginning to sense that the greatest windfall in the history of the rural South had failed to lift up a community where many African Americans still lived in crumbling shacklike homes.

Despite all the casino money, a county that ranked in the 1980s among the nation’s poorest today had one of Mississippi’s highest unemployment rates. A county lashed 30 years ago in a CBS News “60 Minutes” segment for its “apartheid” schools still had a mostly white private academy and a public school system that was 97 percent black and was given a “D” grade by the state. A county that the Rev. Jesse Jackson once described as “America’s Ethiopia” had changed little in its poorest neighborhoods, even as riverfront casinos and other lavish development had sprouted up along the farmland hugging the Mississippi River.

Tunica’s strike-it-rich narrative is a rarity in the Deep South. But the disappointing way it played out shows how fundamental — and possibly intractable — the problems are in an area that lags behind the rest of the country as the poorest region with the least economic opportunity. A major research study last year on upward mobility, measuring a poor child’s chances of climbing the economic ladder, found that Tunica had less opportunity than all but six other counties in the United States — scattered across Alaska, South Dakota and Virginia. The Deep South itself is home to more than half of the most punishing counties.

What went wrong with the Deep South?

Five states in the South are much worse off on economic and social measures than the majority of the country. 
Here’s how the region compares, broken down by county.

MALE LIFE EXPECTANCY, BY COUNTY

Worst fifth  (64 to 72 years)

Middle fifth

Best fifth  (77 to 82 years)

The region is home to some of the lowest life expectancies for both men and women. In many counties of the Mississippi Delta, the average male dies before 70.

Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington

It is a downbeat reality for a region that for much of the second half of the 20th century was actually closing its gap with the rest of the country, helped by the federal war on poverty and the end of legalized segregation. But during the past 15 years — and particularly since the Great Recession — the catch-up has stalled. By some measures, it has reversed. Somebody born today in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia or South Carolina is far more likely than someone born elsewhere in the United States to attend a poorer school, drop out before high school, work a low-paying job, struggle with debt, go to prison and die young, according to national health, labor and education statistics.

Hundreds of years of segregation are now creating a “very hard-to-break pattern of human behavior and economic relations,” said Robert C. Lieberman, the provost at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and an authority on race in America.

But the troubles in the Deep South go well beyond race to include frayed state finances, which have eroded the safety net for the poor, as well as public school underfunding, which leaves those who can afford it scrambling to private schools. And it extends to a growing technological divide that has left significant rural areas without access to the digital world; a rise in single-parenthood, which is a major indicator for generation-to-generation poverty; and the decline of rural job opportunities in states that have long relied on agriculture rather than on urban hubs.

What went wrong in Tunica is a matter of perspective. For many African Americans — and the county’s current officials — it was a story of a largely white political leadership that did not grasp the depths of poverty facing many black residents and did not choose to use the casino revenues that flowed into the county in an equitable way. So instead of funding skills training and providing programs for the vulnerable, they poured money into a riverfront wedding hall, an Olympic-size indoor swimming pool and a golf course designed by a former PGA Tour pro — all while implementing a massive tax cut that primarily benefited the wealthy.

“It is a success story for those in the right social circle,” said Engle-Harris, who is black, echoing the perspectives of many African Americans interviewed here.

To the political leadership that developed the casino plans and spent that money, however, the story is one of good intentions gone awry, an attempt to boost an industry that could potentially create jobs in a corner of the country that never had much of an economy or hope for the future.

Whatever the intentions, the results have left Tunica, and more specifically some of its residents, in an economically dangerous place.

Of the hundreds of millions of dollars that Tunica earned from gambling between 1993 and 2015, just a sliver — about 2.5 percent, according to county records — was used on social programs to help the poor. In the largest of those programs, the county chose a selection of low-income senior citizens for major home renovations: Those living in the worst conditions would get $25,000 for repairs or, if the house proved too dilapidated, a new mobile home.

In Tunica, Miss., former teacher Linda Fay Engle-Harris, 60, must deal with the damage to her home’s ceiling and floors every day. She suspects that the floor issues were caused by flooding related to a street-paving project. A program that would either repair her home or replace it with a trailer is backed up by years due to funding shortfalls.

Until recently, Engle-Harris hadn’t considered the program. As her home fell apart, she dove into her own savings — built up over years as a public school teacher — to pay for the repairs herself. But then, nearly $20,000 was gone, used to pay for new flooring, a new roof and shingles, new linoleum in the bathroom. Engle-Harris had $1,400 left in the bank, and was forced to retire from her middle school teaching job last December when old hip pain grew to be excruciating. She earned $733 per month in disability pay, and even if she wanted to use it for home repairs, she couldn’t; a contractor visited in January and refused the work, calling it pointless.

“You need to knock this thing down,” she recalled him telling her.

Engle-Harris had long considered herself to be what she called a “self-dependent” achiever. She grew up in this very house, went to college, got a master’s degree — all while hobbling around on a left leg that wouldn’t bend properly, the result of a childhood bike accident. But Engle-Harris was beginning to question whether she could halt what she said was a slide from the middle class into poverty. “I’m terrified,” she said.

Engle-Harris thought she had a case to receive county housing support because, she said, the county was partly responsible for the problem. When it paved all the roads, it did not grade them. So the roads rose well above the lawns. Every time it rained, water rolled off the asphalt and toward the houses, collecting under flimsy porches. The neighborhood’s drainage system was overloaded and barely functioning, and Engle-Harris, like many of her neighbors, was living atop a man-made bog.

“It’s like quicksand under the house,” she said. She called the money she’d spent on repair work “a small bandage on a large wound.”

So one Tuesday in mid-January, she drove to the county administrative building and found the housing office.

“I am out of money,” she recalled saying, “and I need help.”

 the years just before gambling, Tunica looked much as it did a century earlier — one of the most preserved places in the Deep South. A few dozen white families owned nearly all the land. Blacks took meager jobs on cotton and soybean farms. The poverty rate was 56 percent, extreme even by the standards of the Mississippi Delta.

A CBS “60 Minutes” segment, filmed in Tunica in 1985, depicted a county with near-total racial separation. African Americans lived in homes that lacked running water. Whites lived just blocks away in comfort. They prayed in separate places, learned in separate places, and spoke of the other race as if it was a competing team. The white Tunica public superintendent sent his own kids to private school. “Apartheid without passed laws or barbed wire,” CBS correspondent Morley Safer called it. “It is as if there was no Little Rock, there was no Selma.”

Tunica’s leaders pitched the advent of casinos in 1992 as a means of progress. “Everyone in Tunica County who wants a job, regardless of their education or skill level, can have one,” Kenneth Murphree, then the county’s administrator, said in 1998.

Encouraged largely by Mississippi’s relaxed casino taxes, the slots and blackjack tables moved in fast. Faux Western saloons and medieval castles rose along the river. Land prices in some areas spiked 100-fold. “One of America’s success stories,” the county called itself in promotional pamphlets. At the height of Tunica’s boom, there were nine casinos; it was the country’s third-largest gambling destination, behind Las Vegas and Atlantic City.

And then, the boom was over. First, new competing casinos popped up across the region. Then, the economic crisis caused millions of Americans to pull back on leisure spending. A 2011 report by a consulting firm called it a “perfect storm.” Visitors plummeted, with the largest casino, Harrah’s, shutting down last year, resulting in a loss of 1,300 jobs.

The county is now facing its own financial problems, pinched by declining gaming revenues, and many in Tunica fear that a massive opportunity has been squandered. Reams of county records and other data going back two decades, coupled with interviews with dozens of longtime residents, as well as past and current leaders, show how Tunica struggled to use the windfall in a way that produced sustainable benefits for more of its residents.

Almost nobody second-guesses the decision to welcome casinos, but many residents and current leaders criticize the use of the money generated. They say that it was, at least in part, misspent, used to nurture a tourism industry that is now sliding backward. Poverty experts who have studied the county say the government would have been better off trying to foster broader economic growth by paying greater attention to job training, building skills and trying to recruit better-paying industries.

Tunica’s leaders “didn’t do a good job in building opportunity for those who were vulnerable,” said Cynthia “Mil” Duncan, an expert on poverty at the University of New Hampshire who has extensively studied the Deep South.

Deer roam where cotton once grew near MGM’s Gold Strike casino and resort in Tunica County.

The Tunica of today physically looks much like other areas in the downtrodden Delta — but with a jarring collection of half-used tourist sites and an airport built to handle 737s that hasn’t serviced a major carrier since 2011. Tunica’s 30 percent poverty rate, compared with the pre-casino days, shows substantial improvement, but is on par with the most troubled places in the country — and twice the national average, according to Census data. Many of Tunica’s residents remain in dire shape. The public high school has a 57 percent graduation rate, compared with 79 percent nationally. One in four people don’t have bank accounts, one of the highest rates in the country. The average life span in Tunica, at 67 for men and 73 for women, remains shorter than nearly anywhere else in the United States — or El Salvador, for that matter.

“If I get sick and it’s 11 p.m. at night, I have to drive 45 miles” to get medicine, said Larry Braziel, a 15-year member of the Tunica school board and a slot machine technician at Bally’s Tunica casino. “It’s absurd.”

For many residents in Tunica, the initial boom opened a path toward a job. The casinos initially over-hired, and Tunica, for a matter of months, was so awash in jobs that its unemployment rate fell to 4 percent. But the jobless rate didn’t stay low long enough to further pull down the poverty rate. For those laid off, there were few places to turn. The jobless rate averaged 12.3 percent last year.

One of Tunica’s most controversial moves came at the beginning of the boom, when the new casinos hugging the Mississippi River rapidly started to generate millions of dollars. Just as quickly, the county moved to slash property taxes to the lowest level of any county in the state, which county officials said was an overture to businesses and investors.

Rise and fall of casino revenue in Tunica County, Miss.

Casino taxes have brought the local governments some $760 million, or about $72,000 for every person living there. Now, the flow is slowing.

Source: Tunica County reports
THE WASHINGTON POST

Murphree, who ran the county from 1994 until 2005, said the property tax cut was a boon to everyone: “Everybody got tax relief. Landowners, everybody who owned a house.”

But simultaneously, it disproportionately benefited Tunica’s wealthy, particularly as some landowners leased their tracts to the casinos in lucrative long-term deals. Tax records show 76 percent of the county’s property tax dollars comes from 100 property-owning entities and individuals among 3,200 who own land in the county.

Most U.S. counties depend on taxes to fund basic services. But in this case, the casino money was used as a replacement — helping to subsidize the giant property tax cut. If taxes were kept at their 1993 levels, the county would have had an extra $100 million.

“Who got rich?” said Michael Thompson, who now runs the county. “The plantation owners.”

Other uses of the money were well-intentioned, residents and officials say, but did not pan out.

A big chunk of the gambling revenue, about 12 percent, was devoted to the public school system — where it led to virtually no improvement. A 1997 state report chided the district for “wasteful” and “imprudent” spending, such as renovations for buildings and “large” raises for maintenance and transportation workers, that failed to improve the academic setting.

The tourist attractions — the golf course, the museums, the wedding hall — were built as part of a plan to turn the county into a place where middle-class Americans would flock for days at a time. But in this case, with the downturn in visitors, those taxpayer-subsidized sites have become a modest drain on the county purses.

“Everything was done with good intentions,” said Cedric Burnett, a longtime member of the county board and president of a local funeral home. “The intention was to increase the patronage and get people to stay longer. Now, did it work? No, it did not.”

Other officials say the county has indeed made critical strides.

“We tend to forget how far we’ve come,” said Webster Franklin, president and CEO of the Tunica Convention and Visitors Bureau. “In 1990, you couldn’t buy shoes in Tunica. There weren’t safe roads to travel on.”

In 2011, as the casino money withered, activists canvassed black neighborhoods, telling voters that two decades of money had been squandered, too little used for anything of value to them.

“We had people coming out to the polls who hadn’t voted for years,” said Joe Eddie Hawkins, a black political activist.

The 2011 elections flipped Tunica’s five-person board of supervisors from having just two black members to entirely black.

One of the newly elected board members called up Thompson, then a young auditor in Jackson, Miss. With casino revenues dwindling, the county needed to quickly cut its own expenses, something it is still struggling to do.

“We are literally living check to check,” said Thompson. “Like a poor family.”

Thompson, 37, who was raised poor in Memphis, recently stumbled upon the “60 Minutes” segment on YouTube . Tunica, in his eyes, still had a version of the same problems.

“I had all types of emotions,” Thompson said of the video. “Anger. Sadness. Disbelief. All of that. Mad at the fact that this stuff used to go on like this. Sad at the fact that it has gone on for so long. And disbelief that it’s still going on today.”

En

gle-Harris was traveling to her godson’s basketball game when she got a call from Mardis Jones, the county housing coordinator. Engle-Harris was hoping for good news after submitting her application and making a plea for assistance.