According to the Detroit News website, Detroit City Council might put rules in place to ban alcohol at clubs with topless dancing. Some lawyer (and member of a large metropolitan church) says “Our goal is to do all we can within the law to root them out. We don’t want the city of Detroit to be the dumping ground for lascivious behavior."
There are three proposed rules that would eviscerate the strip club business in Detroit: 1) Alcohol can’t be served at any existing or new topless clubs, 2) Dancers would have to be at least six feet from patrons and on a stage at all times and 3) Dancers would also have to wear pasties.
Some of the highest unemployment in the nation, a dwindling population as people are continuing to get out of the city at an alarming rate due to inadequate city services, the largest cash cow for the city (The Auto Show) is being courted by the suburbs, vacant houses on every block, City Council members under federal investigation, a city charter that desperately needs to be rewritten and THIS is what they are spending their time worrying about? Drunk people getting too close to a strange woman’s nipples?
Don’t they realize that all these rules are going to do is send strip club patrons across the bridge to Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where they have better alcohol, full nudity and no problem with taking American dollar bills? Do they even care about destroying small businesses at a time when they need to stop losing tax money? Do they care about putting the dancers, bouncers, DJs and waitstaff out of work, causing some of them to leave the area in order to find work in less restrictive cities?
This reminds me of the early-90s when a group of people (including the former mayor Coleman Young) were trying to bring casino gambling to Detroit. The churchgoers didn’t want the city of Detroit to be a dumping ground for the type of illegal and immoral behavior that gambling brings. So they got the proposed casino blocked. Then, a casino opened up in Windsor, Ontario, Canada (right across the bridge). I remember reading that Casino Windsor was the highest earning casino in North America for a while. After years of watching Canada rake in big piles of American cash, Detroit decided to allow casinos. Three of them in what is basically a few mile radius. As far as I know, none of them have permanent buildings and they are all still outperformed by Casino Windsor (now Caesar’s Windsor).
Now I’m not saying that if they are kept in business, the strip clubs will help lead Detroit into a new Golden Age of economic stability and growth, but is putting them out of business really going to help? Are nipples really that scary?