Re: Gee, Skylark, I thought you were asking...
... about Hawaii in 1991.
The state's three biggest employers are the military, the state govt, and the visitor/convention industry. A top-five is the home construction industry.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Japanese real-estate bubble burst, it got ugly. The tourism industry contracted by 30% and didn't recover for over five years. Judging by our home's value, real estate dropped by nearly 50% over the next five years and didn't really recover until, well, last year.
The military's post-DESERT STORM drawdown piled insult on injury by removing a big part of the rental-housing customers and then clamping off all those military construction $$$ hoses.
Somehow the state's bureaucracy managed to survive, but pressure was so severe that civil-service reform almost broke the govt employee's union. The legacy of the state's cost-cutting years led to 2001's bitter three-week teacher's strike (Hawaii's teachers are govt employees) that still has litigation aftershocks.
I guess the moral of the story is that you have to bring your job with you. CPAs, doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters, police, vital appliance maintenance & repair workers all survived. It was a very bad time to be a hotel maid, a luau organizer, or a tour-bus driver. Scott Burns' "entertainment service" providers managed to keep going somehow too, although there were a lot fewer customers.
But, gee, things are MUCH better now, especially if you can afford a median home price of $450K or a median condo of $225K. I toured the MGM's residences and they make Hawaii real estate look like bargains.
OTOH it's probably the casino equivalent of the "joke" about the elderly full-care facility at Howard Johnson's. If MGM will finance your residence's mortgage and an occasional home nursing visit, surely they wouldn't throw out a Scott Burns geezer who spent the equivalent of long-term care prices every year!