ANN ARBOR, MI – Wait, they stayed up all night just for chicken fingers?
That was my first thought reading our University of Michigan reporter William Diep’s story on students camping overnight for the Raising Cane’s opening on South University Avenue.
Star Wars fans with The Phantom Menace. Football fans up at dawn for road tickets. We anxiously wait for nonsensical things all the time. Heck, I even waited outside a Gamestop for a new Madden game when I was a kid.
I’ve just never seen it for fried chicken. But that’s the viral appeal of Raising Cane’s and its nearly 900 locations nationwide.
In the context of Ryan Stanton’s story on the city’s rising costs for downtown businesses, it also got me thinking: we’re living in a city that’s more chicken corporation than college town.
Read more: Are rising rents and taxes driving longtime businesses out of downtown Ann Arbor?
Rent for some stores are eclipsing $10,000 a month, Stanton reported. Downtown Home and Garden owner Kelly Vore and a number of mom-and-pop shops are pulling the ripcord in response.
Vore, preparing to close her Ashley Street store in December, cited a 26% rent increase in 2025 and a 12% increase planned in 2026 that made continuing unsustainable.
It’s not as if downtown isn’t still a desirable place for business. As Stanton reported, retail vacancy rates have improved steadily since a high in 2023, as available spaces are filled up in less than two months on average.
It’s just that franchises and chains are more often the places filling those spaces (plus the University of Michigan). Dunkin’ and Target are going to have more scratch to withstand the early struggles of opening a business than an individual owner. Dearborn chains in Turkish Village Cafe and Bayt Al Mocha have recently arrived, and Detroit franchise Slows Barb BQ is coming soon.
Read more: University of Michigan putting $16.5M of improvements into downtown Ann Arbor lease
Even for chains like Bayt Al Mocha, the downtown rents and taxes are “a little extreme,” said the store’s Amer Almassudi.
“It’s been a little struggle,” he said.
As City Council Member Jenn Cornell told Stanton, some of the narratives about downtown are overblown. There are unique, individually owned spots coming like Recess Cafe, a new food-and-drink spot billed as a place parents can bring their kids to play.
City officials also have expressed excitement about Uplift, the new LGBTQ bar on First Street.
There’s also the example of Echelon Kitchen, one of my favorite new restaurants in the whole county. That is an original concept that beautified a space once housed by a bd’s franchise.
But to be clear, it was made possible by the investment of venture capitalists Bill Stein and Doug Zeif. This is not a criticism, as the investment has sprouted a delicious result.
But in order for Ann Arbor to avoid becoming a downtown of franchises and chains, people with a lot of money have to take risks on unique ideas.
Otherwise, the rising rents will lead to more Raising Cane’s.
More Charlie Kirk, free speech news at UM
I wrote last week about humanizing people in our stories to create empathy. Our education reporter Jackie Smith did just that with an interview with UM graduate and Utah photojournalist Tess Crowley, who was working the Utah Valley University event where conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
This passage stood out:
“Not because it’s difficult to recall the scene,” Smith wrote of Crowley’s perspective. “But because it was chaotic. It happened in a matter of moments — its aftermath in minutes. And everywhere she pointed her camera lens, the trauma was written on the faces of strangers.”
Read more: Michigan photojournalist recalls fatal Charlie Kirk shooting: ‘My hands were shaking’
Kirk’s death brought some fallout in local circles. Government reporter Jen Eberbach wrote about UM assistant professor Charles H.F. Davis III and the backlash he faced from a Republican state senator for an X post that appeared to reference Kirk’s death.
“Even if you believe violence isn’t the answer, it is a solution, especially to the violent conditions and violent rhetoric spewed by empowered people that create them,” a post on Davis’s X account stated before he made his account private.
Related: Dingell attends prayer vigil for Charlie Kirk. ‘We must dial down the rhetoric.’
Spokesperson Kay Jarvis stood by the university’s institutional neutrality policy.
“Faculty members are free to speak and debate issues of the day; but, to be clear, those individual expressions do not represent the views of the university,” Jarvis said.
Davis’ post was the only examination into free speech on campus. Diep wrote about the community pushback on the university’s changes to student misconduct rules.
One concern is the Board of Regents has more authority to intervene in student disciplinary cases. Student groups and faculty alleged that this change could stack the deck against pro-Palestinian protesters already at odds with university leadership.
“It’s become a campus that really chills speech where people are afraid to speak up,” former Faculty Senate Chair Rebekah Modrak said.
Stanton also detailed a pending decision on the lawsuit against the university by The Student Association for Psychedelic Studies. Organizers are fighting the university’s denial for a permit for a fifth-annual Entheofest festival celebrating psychedelic plant and mushroom use and research.
Organizers describe the case as “a constitutional battle for free speech,” one that could go to the Supreme Court if necessary.
Throw in protest after protest at Thursday’s regents meeting, and the First Amendment was certainly exercised across campus this past week.
As a journalist, I will never complain about that.