Another fast-food chicken chain coming to south Iowa Street; maybe Lawrence has more vacant apartments than once thought

Heaven help us, the chickens are multiplying, and this time they’ve gotten their hands on a wrecking ball. Plans are in the works for another fast-food, fried chicken chain to open on south Iowa Street, and the project will involve tearing down a fairly large building along the corridor.

I’ve been telling you for weeks that I’ve heard speculation that a fried chicken chain called Slim Chickens wants to come to Lawrence. I had heard the chain was looking to locate at the old KFC building near Sixth and Wakarusa, but this Slim Chicken may be a wily bird. It now appears the restaurant is set to locate in the former Barbed Wire Steakhouse building at 2412 Iowa St.

City officials have confirmed that a demolition permit has been filed for the 2412 Iowa building, and the permit provides information that says the replacement structure on the site will be a Slim Chickens restaurant.

But I also think that there is a strong possibility that Slim Chickens also will open a restaurant at the Sixth and Wakarusa site. No, that doesn’t sound very slim. It sounds like this chicken has some weight behind it, and plans to throw it around in what is becoming a crowded Lawrence chicken market. In case you have forgotten, the market recently has added Chick-fil-A, Popeyes, a new Buffalo Wild Wings, a Wing Stop, Raising Cane’s, and a Zaxby’s is under construction in the Bauer Farm development near Sixth and Wakarusa.

As for Slim Chickens, I’ll find out more about that chain soon. I’m tentatively scheduled to meet with one of the Lawrence leaders of the chain next week. I’ll get the official scoop then, but if there is one thing I’ve learned about chicken in this town, it is that news of it cannot wait. (If there is a second thing I have learned, it is that pointing to an empty bucket of chicken in the passenger seat and grease on the steering wheel will not get you out of a reckless driving ticket.)

I do have a bit of information about Slim Chickens from the chain’s website. The restaurant’s tag line is “tenders, wings and more,” so not surprisingly the menu has lots of combinations of wings and tenders. It looks like it has almost 10 dipping sauces, ranging from honey mustard to mango habanero to cayenne ranch. In addition, there are about 10 other wing sauces with various levels of heat. The menu also features some salads, sandwiches and wraps.

I should be able to let you know more next week.

In other news and notes from around town:

• The project on the old Barbed Wire site will eliminate one of the larger vacant properties along south Iowa Street. In case you are confused about the location, it more recently has been Wilde’s Chateau 24, a bar and dance club that I never entered because you had to know the hip way to spell Wild to gain entry. The building, though, was built for Barbed Wire Steakhouse, an earlier version of a Texas Roadhouse style chain. But as someone mentioned to me, that was a long time ago.

Regardless, the vacancy rate along south Iowa Street is set to go down. The commercial vacancy rate is one that city leaders try to keep abreast of. However, that’s not the case with another key vacancy rate: the apartment vacancy rate. It seems like it is a guessing game to know how many vacant apartments there are in Lawrence.

Well, I have some new data on that front, although I’m not willing to declare it definitive. The Census Bureau last month released its 2015 American Community Survey results for cities of 65,000 population and greater. That survey includes an estimated vacancy rate for apartments.

Lawrence’s estimated rate checked in at 10.5 percent. The Census Bureau survey has some limitations, and as a result its margin of error is 3.5 percent. That means the vacancy rate could be as low as 7 percent or as high as 14 percent. Regardless, any of those numbers are significantly different from what we’ve reported. We had a recent article about the number of potential new apartments that could be built in Lawrence, and a privately produced report estimated the vacancy rate at 3 percent and on the decline since 2011. An older Census Bureau survey estimated it at 5.3 percent with a margin of error of 1.5 percent plus or minus.

I couldn’t tell you what number is accurate. I doubt anyone at City Hall can either. It seems like an important issue. City Hall leaders are contemplating two issues where having an accurate vacancy rate would be important: 1. They’re considering regulations that could make it more difficult to build apartment complexes on the edge of town, in an effort to limit urban sprawl; 2. They are trying to come up with solutions on affordable housing.

If the city really does have a vacancy rate of more than 10 percent, that likely means there are a significant number of empty apartments in older complexes in the central part of the city. It seems like that would be good information to know before the city embarks on a plan to provide incentives or other assistance to build new affordable housing units. Perhaps it is time to for the city to contract for a comprehensive vacancy rate study of the apartment market.

For what it is worth, here is the Census Bureau’s estimates of vacancy rates for some other Kansas communities, with the margin of error in parenthesis.

• Lawrence: 10.5 (3.5)

• Overland Park: 7.9 (3.5)

• Olathe: 2.6 (2.4)

• Topeka: 12.5 (4.2)

• Wichita: 8.1 (1.9)