➡ The article discusses the closure of McDonald’s outlets in downtown Chicago and the introduction of age restrictions at a McDonald’s in Fairfax County due to incidents of student violence. The closures in Chicago are seen as a sign of declining business in the city, while the age restrictions in Fairfax are a response to disruptive behavior by high school students. The article also mentions the impact of these changes on local communities and the economy.
➡ Detroit is experiencing a revival with an increase in population and the arrival of major retailers. This growth is attributed to the city’s efforts to correct previous undercounts in the census, leading to a more accurate representation of the population. The city’s financial health is also improving, with a budget surplus and a rising credit rating. Meanwhile, other cities like Chicago are struggling with high rents and a declining retail sector.

Let’s talk about McDonald’s, right? Because one of the reports is that downtown Chicago was starting to see an exodus of businesses and I only want to spend 10 minutes on this and then I’m going to show you why. So we’re going to go through two different videos but basically a lot of people don’t even know that the headquarters for McDonald’s is near Chicago, it’s outside of Chicago. It’s outside of Chicago, all right? But we’re starting to see when you know how you know that a business is done, you know how you know that a city is completely, it’s a wrap, it’s the beginning of the end.

When you start seeing fast food places close up, that’s it. That’s it. There’s nothing it’s a dumpster fire. When you start seeing fast food places close up and then you’re gonna you let me tell you what’s going to start happening to the storefronts in Chicago. Not only is it going to start to look like Oakland, all right? And I rock with Oakland. But you’ll start to see church fronts. They’re going to start trying to give out rent for free for six months. You’re gonna see artistry and stuff like that. Church fronts, liquor stores, buy anything in here for a dollar, all of that type of stuff.

You’re gonna start seeing cheap products. If you start to see places leaving en masse, it’s a wrap, y’all. Fairfax County McDonald’s is restricting the age of customers who can dine inside. Good evening. I’m Scott Thuman. We first showed you this sign last night at 11 o’clock. It states if you’re over 21, you must bring a doorbell to be let in. This is at the McDonald’s in Franconia near Thomas Edison High School. And new at 6 o’clock tonight, we spotted a team being denied entry. 7News Jay Korf is live there now. And Jay, the change comes after recent fights involving teenagers.

Yeah, you know, management here is just sick and tired of Thomas Edison High School students coming over here, really taking over the inside of the dining room, getting into fights, trashing the bathroom, throwing their garbage all over the place. You know, so now the doors are locked, but the restaurant is still open. It only happens with the kids. The normal community comes here. Every interacts are great. The McDonald’s on Franconia Road in Fairfax County kicked off new safety measures, angering teenagers and thrilling adults. I think it’s a great thing. This is the first time in probably five years I sat down for 15 minutes and this McDonald’s and enjoyed an hamburger.

To get into this McDonald’s, customers are greeted at all entrances, which are locked, with a sign saying they have to be over 21 to dine inside. How bad does it have to be? Let me see this sign, which are locked with a sign saying they have to be over. Due to repeated incidents of student violence. This is in Fairfax. This is in Chicago. We don’t get to Chicago in a minute. This is in Virginia. I have never been to Fairfax. I need you guys to be able to tell me what it’s like over in Fairfax.

Should I go and visit Fairfax or should I stay far away from it? It says effective immediately. Due to repeated incidents of student violence, this McDonald’s location is temporarily closed for dying in service to anyone under 21 years of age. This decision was made to protect our staff, guests and community. How bad do you have to be? How bad does a community have to be? To where you got to have an ID 21 and up to get into a McDonald’s like it’s a club. I’ve seen places like night spots and brunch spots.

I’ve seen places start to be 40 and up. They’re going 35 and 40 and up. It used to be 21 and up. The highest that I’ve seen it growing up was they would have adult skate where it was like 21 and up and then I heard 25 and up for some other thing. I’ve never actually seen 35 and 40 and up. Some of these places, some of these locations, they don’t even want your money. They don’t care about your business. I’ve seen a lot of places start to go 25, 35, 40 and up. It’s crazy.

You got to have an ID to get a McDonald’s over in Fairfax. For 21 to dine inside, a doorbell alerts a staff member who lets you in. As you can see, they’re happy to greet some customers while others get denied. According to a spokesperson for this franchise, student violence and disrespectful behavior erupts here at least once a week and staff and customers are sick of it. Thomas Edison High School is just across the street. And I come here every morning, you know, I get my sauce is getting my hash red. Robert Hankaski says for nearly 50 years, he’s been frequent this McDonald’s.

This is the solely Methodist and probably over 10 years. He says high school students routinely trash the bathrooms, start fights in the dining area and generally provide an unpleasant experience for everyone. The fighting is a problem. You know, I’m saying you will get one. It’ll call me and they get mad. They’re pretty brazen. You know what I mean? The management trying to step in and you know, these kids are pretty violent. They’re not really kids. Let’s be honest. They’re young adults in a prepared statement. Not Cassie though. Donald’s local owner said in part we’ve enhanced our Franconia Road McDonald’s security measures to promote a safe environment for our staff and customers.

This policy was developed in partnership with local school officials and oversight from local law enforcement. They’re just trying to stop the violence. You know what I mean? It’s just stop the, you know, because it’s not fair to, you know, any other customer comes in here just for a sandwich or a hard-working person they got to put a bunch of idiots. And then we should note that parents with children, of course, are welcome into the dining room. And if you’re under 21, you can certainly go through the drive through. You can do the mobile app and get your food curbside.

So that’s a situation there. Now we should note, I reached out personally to both the police department to find out about the number of calls here. We know it’s been a lot. They never got back in touch with us. The school system did get back in touch with us because we wanted to know what was going on. And they said that they alerted the entire student body to this situation. And they expect these students to act accordingly. You can’t change savages because you haven’t changed their parents. You can’t change an environment or culture because you have to change their parents.

The parents are evil. The parents are raising children. The parents are the one that are the issues. I don’t know if this is a black community, a white community. I don’t know what it is. But the parents are the ones that create these little monsters and then they can control themselves. And they mess it up for everybody. Let me go over to this next one. And this is Chicago. This is what’s happening in downtown Chicago. This is how Brandon Johnson is running y’all city, y’all. Check it out. People who work in the loop are often looking for a quick and affordable lunch.

That includes us here at CBX. Some of our colleagues noticed there used to be lots of McDonald’s locations nearby. Check out all those golden arches. But one by one, you can see most have disappeared. So we sent our Lauren victory to find out. That’s crazy. This is crazy. Bro, one of the most resilient places is a McDonald’s. I’ve seen Wendy’s close up. I’ve seen Burger King. I’ve seen Tim Horton’s close up. I’ve seen a Popeye’s leave. I have never, ever, nope, I take that back. I have seen one and they changed it into a Coney Island.

That’s the one that I got robbed at when I was younger. Do you know how hard and how heavily hit? McDonald’s is almost like print money. It’s very close to a Chick-fil-A when it comes to print money. Do you know how difficult it is and how bad it has to be in the city for you to close McDonald’s? And they’ve closed what looks like 60% of them, two thirds of the McDonald’s already, two, four, six, they still got four, so they closed 60% of them. They’ve closed six out of 10 McDonald’s inside of Chicago.

That’s revenue, taxes, jobs, opportunity that’s just leaving Chicago. Hey, last person out of Chicago, go ahead and close the doors, y’all. Why? These vacant storefronts sit just a block off Chicago’s famous Michigan Avenue. A welcome greeting of graffiti. Are you getting tired of answering the question? How is the Loop doing? No, not really, because every day there’s something new and improved. Like the restaurant where the Chicago Loop Alliance’s Michael Edwards met us. More on memento in a moment. First, an assessment of the Loop’s health. First quarter of this year, a million people came down, $280 million in economic impact.

Downtown foot traffic on the weekends is even higher than before the pandemic. Consumers are coming. Commercial tenants, not as much. High rent doesn’t help. We tend to only bring in large retailers and national retailers, and many of them are downsizing. One company that left a super-sized hole downtown, McDonald’s. There used to be one right here between Randolph and Washington. You know what’s so funny? You know what’s so funny, y’all? And I hate to compare, but I just have to because y’all used to laugh at us and now we winning. Bro, we just secured so many major tenants in downtown Detroit.

They got Cozum coming through. Aloe is opening up a store in the Hudson site. The Apple store opens up in, I think, a month or so. The Gucci store is right around the block. Shenola is popping. Rihanna’s Fenty Savage just opened up a store in downtown Detroit. It is exploding. Absolutely exploding. So it’s so funny, and the weekends be so packed, and I’ll be thinking to myself, where are all of these people coming from? It’s so funny to see so many franchises and retailers leave Chicago, yet we are absolutely exploding in activity, and they just released the census and we just had a population increase in Detroit again.

It’s so funny. Hold on, let me see. Because they’re not going to believe it. I don’t want no audio podcasts. Let me see. Now to a live look over downtown Detroit, where the city’s population is on the rise once again. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Detroit gained more than 6,700 residents in 2024, bringing the estimated total to more than 645,000. Now that’s a far cry from the number of residents that the city had in 1950, when there was over 1,800,000 residents. As you can see here, the city has been on the steady decline ever since, down to nearly 640,000 residents by the year 2020.

But if we zoom into the past several years, you can see that this is the second year in a row that the city has been on an upswing with a rise in that number of residents. Now, 7 News Detroit reporter Darren Cunningham is listening to city leaders today about what’s behind the growth. I love the community so much that I’m not leaving. This community, I’m staying right here. Lois Foster says she downsized to her Warrendale neighborhood home on Detroit’s west side nearly a decade ago. And in the past few years, she says she’s started to see once vacant homes become spruced up and occupied.

In 2020, she says she was a part of the census team that tried its best to get an accurate count of the city’s population. You know, like I said, we had some that didn’t want to answer because they were suspicious of what they were going to use the information for. But despite census workers’ best efforts, the city contends the population was undercounted and that the count needed to be revisited. They weren’t counted right, and that’s what they did. They went back and started seeing that, okay, this wasn’t counted. That wasn’t counted. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says a task force made up of community members and city leaders made the case to the U.S.

Census Bureau, explaining why the city’s population counted being overlooked in each of the past two years. And to the Census Bureau’s credit, they looked at the studies we gave them. They pulled out addresses and they visited houses themselves. And they said, they’re right. This isn’t correct. At his press conference, Duggan said the Census Bureau nationally, for the first time, is counting newly occupied renovated homes and apartment buildings in the city’s population base. Last year, the Fed said we gained 1,800 people in 2023. They just revised that number up to 7,000.

They realized they failed to count the renovated houses. And this year, another 7,000 people. That’s about 14,000 additional people added to Detroit’s census count in the last two years. So shout out to Mayor Mike Duggan. Shout out to everybody that continues to grow. Detroit is one of the very, very, very, very, very, very rare blue cities that is actually winning, that is growing, that has a ton of retailers. Man, I see so many people moving into the city. It is. It’s a lot of people that’s trying to move back. It’s a lot of people that’s coming back.

I even talked to a couple of my buddies that took a job over here. And I know a guy from Canada that said that he was moving to the city. So anyways, I’m just thankful that things are changing, that there’s a lot of renovation, that there’s a lot of growth, there’s a lot of building, it’s a lot of cranes that’s in the air. And I’m not moving. I’m never moving. But shout out to Chicago. I hope that y’all figure out how to stop that bleeding. We’re operating at a budget surplus. So every year, we actually are in the green.

Our credit rating as a city has gone up significantly. And Chicago is facing a $1.14 billion budget deficit yet again for this year, and it’s supposed to increase next year. [tr:trw].

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