I believe the bar that is going in next to the nuthouse maybe a BW3's. A friend of mine was leaving the nuthouse during his lunch last week and a couple of business men were standing out front of the empty building talking about how business would be when they open and one was wearing a BW3 logo-ed shirt.
That might be cool, attracting a chain resturaunt is important to downtown. I just wish it could be a better chain than buffalo wild wings, something like TGI's or something.
My guess is those teachers who say downtown is a ghost town at night haven't been downtown after work in a while. On Friday and Saturday night especially, many of the parking spaces at the core of Washington Square are filled from folks at the downtown bars and, of course, Cooley students at the law library. It's amazing the difference in just the past 2-3 years. Still some work to do, but it's gettin' there when you start to hear about parking complaints at night.
Very true. I've noticed that in even just the last year or two things getting much more interesting at night, though, the city still has a very long way to go, and many similar-sized cities are many years ahead in their central city revitalizations.
Any thoughts on this recent "crime wave?" The way it is being reported doens't exactly help the cities image. With 11 murders so far this year, we're on track for a high-crime year, but probably still not near the crime rates in the 80's, at least when it comes to murder.
As insensitive as it sounds, this really isn't as many homicides as are happening in other cities of Lansing's size, and I still think Lansing is very safe.
I'm really suprised to see Dayton had that many. I feel the same way though, I wouldn't consider the number of homicides to be any problem unless we consistantly get 20 or more per year, anything less and we still have a low crime rate. We have just been fortunate enough to have a few years with very few murders, now that we're back to "reality" people are scared.
Comments
Crime statistics for 2005, based on murder rate then violent crime rate:
[ulist]
[li] 1 Gary, Indiana: Population: 100,065; Homicides: 58[/li]
[li] 4 Flint, Michigan: Population: 119,814; Homicides: 48[/li]
[li] 16 Dayton, Ohio: Population: 160,363; Homicides: 32[/li]
[li] 71 Lansing, Michigan: Population: 117,036; Homicides: 8[/li]
[/ulist]
From Wikipedia: Crime rate for cities between 100,000 and 250,000