Next Tuesday evening, August 4th at Nollen Plaza, your local Downtown Neighborhood Association and the Downtown Community Alliance are hosting the 26th Annual National Night Out event.

This is an excellent opportunity to get out and meet your neighbors, listen to live music and sample some cuisine and services from downtown businesses. Some of this year’s sponsors include: Sbrocco, Splash Seafood Restaurant & Oyster Bar, Fong’s Pizza, Atelier Hairspace, Dos Rios Cantina & Tequila Lounge, and sandwiches courtesy of the Pork Producers.

I plan on attending and would love to meet some of my regular readers, so come join us.

Continuing with our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week, this week’s picture comes from Brooke Peterson.

Brooke says “I took this photo on a beautiful summer evening at Principal Park. Not only was it a great night to watch our very own Iowa Cubs, but it was also a perfect sunset. This photo, with its pink and purple colors of the sky and the silhouette of the water tower on the roof of the Brown-Camp Lofts was taken from my seat at the stadium.”

Check out previous pictures in of our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week.

I’m not saying that we have a problem with bike theft downtown, but if we did, maybe the Des Moines Police Department could take a page out of the Boston Police Department’s playbook and use social media tools, such as Twitter and Facebook for tracking downtown stolen bikes.

The Stolen Bikes Boston Community Alert initiative is a simple albeit wise way to let you report your stolen bike. The site then notifies the police, bike shops, and local security, plus posts to the the City’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. Local residents can then follow the Twitter or Facebook accounts and report any sightings of the stolen bikes.

According to police department spokesman, “Leveraging Twitter and Facebook, on top of traditional channels, is a great to way to get the community involved and active in city crime-fighting efforts. The immediate nature of status updates, and their mobile distribution, means that more and more people can have instant access to the bike theft reports, increasing the likelihood that more lost bikes will be recovered.”

Boston Police have been using using Twitter for a while down to help get the word out on crime in the community. Here’s an example tweet from the Boston PD:

“INJURED OFFICER: Officer from district 4 transported to Beth Israel Hospital, human bite to arm, suspect in custody.“

A user named @willcady asked the following:

“@Boston_Police if that was a zombie bite, would you tell us?”

…to which @Boston_Police replied:

“@willcady Yes, absolutely“

I would love to see Judy Bradshaw get the Des Moines Police Department on a similar path. What do you think? Would you follow the Des Moines Police Department on Twitter? Friend them on Facebook?

A recent article on The Big Money, by Jonathan Weber, discusses growth across the country moves away from suburban and exurban fringe and toward center-cities and close-in suburbs.

Here are few excerpts from the article that caught my attention:

What’s behind this shift? Empty-nesters don’t need the big house and don’t want to mow the big lawn. High gas prices are making long commutes less practical. The urban renaissance in big cities…and the revival of charming, vibrant downtowns in small cities…is making the bedroom suburb and the strip mall seem positively dull.

Retailers are the most obviously affected by these trends. For decades, locating a store in a mall on the fringe rather than downtown had a lot of obvious advantages: plenty of easy parking, tons of drive-by traffic from big-box neighbors, and newer buildings with better infrastructure.

These benefits won’t disappear overnight. Over the long run, though, they will diminish in importance, especially if more big retail chains and shopping-mall operators go out of business. Downtown shopping districts, meanwhile, will benefit from increased investment and more proximate residents. If we assume, as many economists do, that the country is “over-retailed,” some downtown development plans based on more shopping will stall, but the center will still prosper relative to the fringe — and more businesses might find the downtown storefront affordable.

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Sales have been a little slow the first six months of 2009, only 18 units selling this year compared to 33 during the same first six months of the year in 2009, but with the recession and financing difficulty in some complexes, this is still proving that people are wanting to move downtown.

The average selling price was $210,038 and median sales price was $194,400. In my opinion very affordable prices for a downtown condo. The biggest project bringing in the buyers for 2009 thus far is 4th & Court Condominiums, with 33% of all downtown buyers choosing 4th & Court Condominiums as their choice for living.

So I dug into my pockets and made a small investment into installing a downtown webcam, and by the way if you are wondering where it’s looking from, it’s my view from my downtown loft. For a city our size, it’s hard to believe we don’t have public webcams set up all over the city, but we don’t.

It would be nice to have webcams available with views of:

• Nolen Plaza
• Court Avenue District
• Gateway Park / Pappajohn Sculpture Garden
• Iowa Events Center

What other webcams I have been able to find are listed below.

• KCCI’s Downtown Towercam
• Downtown Webcam
• Principal Riverwalk Webcam

Continuing with our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week, this week’s picture comes from Flickr user Eric, also known as “Uncle Eric” and is of Science Center downtown.

Check out previous pictures in of our series, Des Moines Picture of the Week.

I know I’m not the first to express this, but it is inconceivable to me that Wells Fargo Arena does not even exist on the current skywalk signage or directories. The facility has been open for over 3 and a half years and if an out-of-towner looks at the signs to find the arena-well it just doesn’t exist.

I swear, if I wouldn’t get arrested for defacing public property (could I call it art?), I’m going to take a label maker down there and just start adding Wells Fargo Arena to all the directories and over-head signs!

Actually I’m trying to find out when and where the next meeting of the “Des Moines SkywalkCommittee” is to be held and hope to attend. I know the skywalks are a unique combination of public and private interests but the public sector hasn’t accomplished anything on this in way to long a time.

While I think we have a beautiful city and love living here, I can’t help but notice some of our urban decay just two or blocks from some of our biggest downtown draws, such as the new Pappajohn Sculpture Garden or our entertainment Court Avenue District.

Wikipedia defines urban decay as: “a process by which a city, or a part of a city, falls into a state of disrepair. It is characterized by depopulation, economic restructuring, property abandonment, high unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and desolate and unfriendly urban landscapes.” I think downtown Des Moines’ urban decay is focus around property abandonment and unfriendly urban landscapes.

One of the main thoroughfares into downtown from the airport is crossing the George Carver Washington bridge on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. Take a look at two of the first buildings that you see when coming into downtown this way, the Crane Co. building and the once proposed Opus condo building. I’m not sure who owns it or what can be done about it, but check out the two photos below.

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Ok, I just read one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen today. I remember back in my youth when the movie Footloose came out that was about the dumb laws of Elmore City, Oklahoma that banned dancing. Well it came to my surprise, Des Moines has a similar law that goes into effect every night at 2am. I’m not talking about drinking past 2am, I’m talking about dancing past 2am.

According to the AP story, an obscure city ordinance outlaws public dancing after 2am and most residents and bar owners were not even aware of the law until members of the nonprofit Des Moines Social Club sought to hold an after-hours dance at their downtown building and were told no.

The law which dates to at least 1942, bans public dancing between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. Monday through Saturday. For more check out the full article at: http://www.thestate.com/166/story/862156.html.

This is not the type of recognition Des Moines needs when it’s trying to attract more young people to live here.