Town Buys & Closes Cafe Risque

[ACougar]

Strip clubs don't generally appear in affluent or upscale business areas. A lot of the crime that happens around strip clubs would happen with or without the presence of the strip club. Assuming a strip club is owned by people not involved in organized crime, who don't intend on breaking any laws... a strip club is basicly harmless. Unfortunatly that's not always the case.

The biggest problem with buying a club and shuting it down is that you've just created another bussiness oportunity. If I open a strip club there, I won't have any competition and if I get lucky the town will buy the club from me.

It's pretty much common knowledge, but if you insist ...

http://www.alliancealert.org/2008/02/27/wonder-what-happens-at-strip-clubs/
http://www.nbc24.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=71611 (re: Cal-Irvine prof's analysis of crime in and around strip clubs)
http://blog.oregonlive.com/nwheadlines/2008/06/feds_bust_colacurcio_crime_fam.html (re: prostitution in clubs led to federal indictments)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4441/is_200411/ai_n16056864 (re: Memphis strip club owners arrested for promoting prostitution)

Strip clubs are not harmless. Prostitution is not "victimless." Strip clubs are not legitimate businesses, even though they try to appear and act as though they are legitimate. The owners are generally sleazy low-level covers for higher-ups in organized crime, promotion of drug abuse and dealing is a generally accepted activity in their vicinity, and they drive truly legitimate business away. Where you find strip clubs, you find crime, and I'm positive that's not something Livonia nor any other small town wants to promote.

 

[psalm511013]

Strip clubs don't generally appear in affluent or upscale business areas. A lot of the crime that happens around strip clubs would happen with or without the presence of the strip club.

Not true. One, many are now locating to high-profile neighborhoods and shopping areas, trying to appear more "respectable." Even those that are in "low-life" areas attract high-profile targets -- suburban customers coming to the inner city -- for the local thugs to rob, assault or murder.

Assuming a strip club is owned by people not involved in organized crime, who don't intend on breaking any laws... a strip club is basicly harmless.

That's an unsubstantiate assumption because I don't think you could find a club not connected to organized crime. I trust the cops on this one. It's not like their trying to paint an immoral image for their benefit. They just don't want to deal with the extra crime these sleazeball clubs create.

 

[SallyNow]

Oh, yeah, harmless. For years, officers of the law have complained about the secondary effects of strip clubs. Strip club case files speak volumes. When a strip club moves in, officers say, crime goes up and property values go down.

Any stats?

Arrests and assaults increase along with the potential for blight and the neighborhood's overall crime index.

Any stats?

Most small towns have affordable housing. Its the cities where people can't afford to live.

Uh... is that so?
Harvard, sadly, disagrees: http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/publications/markets/son2008/index.htm

Given the information I posted in response to Clark, I think saving what the town has might be deemed more important initially than funding these things.

Spending $1,000,000 on shutting down a strip club is a lot of money to shut down a strip club. It also leaves many men and women without jobs - men and women who may have started to work at a strip club because of lack of access to more stable jobs.

Job-creation programs and training funding are needed before a city goes in and closes a employer that employs under-skilled or under-employed workers.

And how do you know Lavonia doesn't already have these things? You're making a massive assumption that may be incorrect.

Massive assumptions? Most juristictions are short on what I listed.

Lavonia has a high poverty rate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavonia,_Georgia
which makes wasting $1,000,000 tearing down a business that was making money a huge, irresponsible waste.

Then the County can pass an ordinance banning them, or refuse to grant a liquor license, or any other measure that would prevent them from opening. You and others seem to be a lot more upset about this than the citizens of Lavonia are.

I don't think this is a laughing matter.

After all, it's their tax money.

... in a town with a high poverty rate, there are certainly better thing that can be done $1,000,000 rather than wasting closing a revenue-creating, tax-paying business that could have been closed using legal means.

They had to have had a say in this process and it appears they are quite happy about what was done with their $1 million.

Any facts to back that up? Or just that "they had to" because you want them to have had a say?

I don't think the people of Lavonia thought it was a waste, or it wouldn't have happened.

City councils do some pretty messed up things, often without the permission of the people. Just look at any town in the land and I'm sure you'll find that the city officials have done at least one thing in the past political term that was outrageous and angered the locals, but that the locals could do nothing to stop... so they just let it happen.

Chill out. It will be OK. Strip clubs elsewhere still thrive.

I don't care about the strip clubs. I care about the employees at the strip club who are now out of jobs, I care about the people who could have actually benefitted from the $1,000,000. In a small town $1,000,000 can do a lot of good, and instead it was wasted on closing down a trashy nuisance.

 

[ACougar]

I don't believe that every strip club out there is connected to organized crime, drugs or prostitution. We only have one in this area, and I don't believe any of that stuff goes on there.

I can't prove it though, we do see the police blotter in the local paper a couple times a week and I don't recall an unusual amount of activity in that area but that could be due to a heavy police presense at night. It might be lowering property values a bit in the neiborhood where it exists, but other than that I don't think it's doing any harm.

Not true. One, many are now locating to high-profile neighborhoods and shopping areas, trying to appear more "respectable." Even those that are in "low-life" areas attract high-profile targets -- suburban customers coming to the inner city -- for the local thugs to rob, assault or murder.That's an unsubstantiate assumption because I don't think you could find a club not connected to organized crime. I trust the cops on this one. It's not like their trying to paint an immoral image for their benefit. They just don't want to deal with the extra crime these sleazeball clubs create.

 

[psalm511013]

I don't believe that every strip club out there is connected to organized crime, drugs or prostitution. We only have one in this area, and I don't believe any of that stuff goes on there.

No offense, Cougar, but that's extremely naive of you.

I can't prove it though, we do see the police blotter in the local paper a couple times a week and I don't recall an unusual amount of activity in that area but that could be due to a heavy police presense at night. It might be lowering property values a bit in the neiborhood where it exists, but other than that I don't think it's doing any harm.

Have you ever had to counsel a young woman who has felt there was no other option for her but to sell her body? Do you have any idea how degrading that is for her? Particularly if she has kids at home and this is the only way she can find to support them? Do you know what happens when a young woman like that becomes anxious, angry, aggrieved or depressed over what she is doing? Even if she isn't actually engaging in sex, she is nonetheless purveying the feelings associated with it, and sometimes customers get rough. When the pain, grief and depression gets to be too much, she turns to booze, and when that stops working, it's drugs -- be it the kind half the crowd in the bar/club can get her, or the kind that comes over the prescription med counter at WalMart, because she found a friendly doctor in the crowd to give her a 'scrip. Maybe she becomes an addict, maybe she turns a trick for the lure of easy cash, and maybe either the dealer or the 'john' is an undercover cop. Now she's in jail, loses her kid(s) and is on a long, long road to recovering her sobriety, her sanity and her custody of her children.

Please don't tell me these clubs are "harmless." I know better. Even if you could find a club not owned by some sleazeball in organized crime, or a club that doesn't almost instantly raise the crime rate in the neighborhood to which it moves, there is a human toll that people who say "it's harmless" just don't think about.

 

[ACougar]

Please don't tell me these clubs are "harmless." I know better. Even if you could find a club not owned by some sleazeball in organized crime, or a club that doesn't almost instantly raise the crime rate in the neighborhood to which it moves, there is a human toll that people who say "it's harmless" just don't think about.

They exist because thier is a demand for them, and unforunatly there is no shortage of women who are willing to take this kind of work... Paying a club owner one million dollars of tax payer money and then shutting the place down isn't going to change that.

No doubt it is a very poor decision for most women and it can lead down a very destructive path.

 

[psalm511013]

They exist because thier is a demand for them, and unforunatly there is no shortage of women who are willing to take this kind of work... Paying a club owner one million dollars of tax payer money and then shutting the place down isn't going to change that.

No doubt it is a very poor decision for most women and it can lead down a very destructive path.

So it's one less place for them to make the mistake of working. That's a good thing, right?

 

[SallyNow]

So it's one less place for them to make the mistake of working. That's a good thing, right?

As I've posted earlier, the town already has a unfortunate rate of poverty.

Which is why it's a disgrace that the town would spend $1,000,000 on closing down a legal place of business without first ensuring that there are legit job placements for the employees of the strip club.

A strip club is far from an ideal place to work, but it's better than some of the alternatives.

Of course, the town could have spent $1,000,000 on job creation or on career training courses and shut down the strip club using methods of legality, but instead they got impatient and wasted that $1,000,000 and put people out of work.

 

[ACougar]

It's a good thing that there is one less strip club, but a bad thing that 1 million taxpayer dollars was used to buy it out. I can think of a half dozen things that would have a much greater positive effect on the community... like a scholorship fund for at risk youth, upgrading the local school system, adopting a village in a third world country and helping them build schools, clinics, establish an anti-drug/anti-prostitution task force, a public works youth employment program... over the long term this will cost the city much more than 1 million, right off the bat it emiminates a possible 1.2 million dollar savings for the city and then there is the lost tax revenue.

So the local boys have to drive 20 minutes to go see some strippers, at least until someone else decides to open a strip club where there is a proven market. I think it makes more sense to just tax the heck out of it, and then use that money fight crime.

So it's one less place for them to make the mistake of working. That's a good thing, right?

 

[Dale]

Instead of buying out a strip club, why not just ban them? Local governments have tried to do just that in Florida, Georgia and other places. The courts have thrown the laws out, protecting the strip clubs and their owners and ignoring the social consequences. Nude dancing is said by lawyers to be an art form protected under the First Amendment.

This doesn't make any sense to me. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn't say anything about protecting every art form. There have been crime scenes where a murderer artfully arranges the pieces of the victim's body. Is that protected? The First Amendment protects the content of political, religious or philosophical speech, not every art form anyone can come up with.

The other problem is that if nude dancing is an art form then so is prostitution. Yet prostitution has always been illegal. No one seems to see a Constitutional issue here. I am forced to conclude that the judges who throw out laws banning strip clubs are probably strip club customers themselves. They see it from the viewpoint of affluent guys with too much spending money to throw away at strip clubs. They do not see it from the viewpoint of working class women who see it as exploitation.

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[Dale]

SallyNow in post #23:
" 'They had to have had a say in this process and it appears they are quite happy about what was done with their $1 million.'
Any facts to back that up? Or just that "they had to" because you want them to have had a say?"

From the link in the OP:
"Lavonia's mayor got a standing ovation when he announced the deal at a meeting earlier this week."

Also, on the city's previous attempts to close down the strip club:
"Lavonia's mayor got a standing ovation when he announced the deal at a meeting earlier this week."

 

[TuxThePenguin]

From the link in the OP:
"Lavonia's mayor got a standing ovation when he announced the deal at a meeting earlier this week."

Also, on the city's previous attempts to close down the strip club:
"Lavonia's mayor got a standing ovation when he announced the deal at a meeting earlier this week."

is that a standing ovation from a thousand people or just three?

 

[ACougar]

Let people make thier own decisions, it's not the job of government to tell us what to see, what to do, what to think... violence against people, theft, fraud, people with power taking advantage of people without power, these are the things goverment should regulate... what someone does to themselves, what they look at, how they choose to look, how they persue life, liberty and happiness... government should stay out of these areas until one persons liberty begins infringing on anothers.

Instead of buying out a strip club, why not just ban them? Local governments have tried to do just that in Florida, Georgia and other places. The courts have thrown the laws out, protecting the strip clubs and their owners and ignoring the social consequences. Nude dancing is said by lawyers to be an art form protected under the First Amendment.

This doesn't make any sense to me. For one thing, the First Amendment doesn't say anything about protecting every art form. There have been crime scenes where a murderer artfully arranges the pieces of the victim's body. Is that protected? The First Amendment protects the content of political, religious or philosophical speech, not every art form anyone can come up with.

The other problem is that if nude dancing is an art form then so is prostitution. Yet prostitution has always been illegal. No one seems to see a Constitutional issue here. I am forced to conclude that the judges who throw out laws banning strip clubs are probably strip club customers themselves. They see it from the viewpoint of affluent guys with too much spending money to throw away at strip clubs. They do not see it from the viewpoint of working class women who see it as exploitation.

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