From SuspireWiki
Atlantic City is not the largest city on the east coast, but it is and will always be one of the main tourist attractions on the east coast. People come and go on hopes of hitting it big, having a good vacation with the family, or just watching a boxing event that is being hosted in one of the hotels at the time. Most people coming to risk it all leave penniless. But still yet, the general feeling from people on the street is that they're either exited for their chance to win or they're morose, lost in the debts they've put themselves into trying to chase the dream of the big win.
The local government tries to do more for the city, but the city has to deal with crime running rampant as well as simply being considered an inferior copy of Las Vegas or Carcosa, similar to the plague of opinion on Biloxi, Mississippi (or really any other "gambling town" that isn't one of the two major metropolitan areas priorly mentioned). Internally, there's simply too many arguments on who would know "what's best" for the city for anything truly ground-breaking to occur. But the casinos are still rich, and the politicians can and do afford to keep their wallets fat by simply wasting time and arguing over semantics.
The Kindred of Atlantic City
The Carthians had a deep power in the city’s government and did its best to make the city a better place as well as to attract more people to Atlantic City for quite a long time. However, though their efforts worked in part they still lost control of the city to an Invictus coterie that moved in with the casinos. The legalization of gambling for Atlantic City itself in 1978 allowed a small Invictus coterie to see the benefit of getting entrenched early into a new venue for control and power. The Movement was unable to build any substantial ties with the casinos that came into the city due to infighting, and the tie of power and influence from the entry of the casinos started to shift from the settled in Carthians to the 3 new members of the First Estate with a drive for the city under their fingers.
Deals were made so that neither group would work against the other group for a set period of time; the Movement felt that they could get the Invictus as a new ally and so gave the Invictus control of the boardwalks as well as the areas that the casinos were in as a regency, and the Invictus vowed that for fifteen years they would not work against the Movement’s interests. This came to be a mistake for the floundering Movement, as they could not act against the Invictus either. The regency became the area which attracted the most attention for feeding grounds due to the vast number of people in the area. After the fifteen year deal was up, the Invictus were too strong to be stopped. They took the city in a bloodless coup, and named their eldest Prince.
Since the Invictus have taken control of the city, the change to a feudal society has been noticeable. There is a more palpable feeling of control in the city, the Prince seemed to have better respect from the Kindred in general (mostly through formed agreements with the Circle of the Crone and the Ordo Dracul) and there were too many political ties between the other two covenants which kept them as a shadow of their former selves in wake of the changes.