Jefferson East positively impacting Detroit, grateful for War Memorial partnership
Folks may have noticed a connection to The War Memorial at this year’s Jazzin’ at The Vanity.
In June, The War Memorial was a proud presenter of Jazzin’ at The Vanity, a two-day jazz and blues festival. It featured live performances by local and national performers, great food, a cool marketplace, crafts, visual art experiences, kids' activities, and more.
“We’ve had a long relationship with The War Memorial over the years with hosting events and there was always this desire to see how do we break down barriers between the Grosse Pointes and the city of Detroit,” Jefferson East, Inc. Chief Executive Officer Josh Elling said. “We want to link assets along Jefferson like The War Memorial and the Jefferson Chalmers business district.”
He estimates between 5,000 and 6,000 people attended the jazz festival.
Jefferson East, Inc. was established in 1994. At that time, Elling said the desire to foster economic development in the Jefferson Chalmers business district.
“The group of residents that originally came together to form Jefferson East advocated around the development of Riverbend Shopping Center,” he said. “After that, folks realized the historic commercial corridor in Jefferson Chalmers really needed a lot of attention.”
For a while, the organization's focus, Elling said, was on façade programs, small business support, business incubation and clean and safe initiatives. For 14 years until 2016, Jefferson East hosted a jazz festival, called Jazzin’ on Jefferson.
“A big growth area for us recently was our housing services,” he said. “We kept hearing about this need from residents and about five years ago, we started to do intake on the 0% loan program, housing counseling, helping more than 4,500 Detroiters get access to some sort of housing services.”
Elling came aboard the organization, originally known as the Jefferson East Business Association, in 2007.
“We’ve put a historic district in place, we redid zoning to make it more of a traditional main street zoning which promoted pedestrianism,” he said. “We also did the initial streetscape planning in the early 2000s to take a lane out of Jefferson, calming traffic.”
Its mission is growing Detroit’s East Jefferson corridor and its neighborhoods through facilitative leadership, collaborative partnership, innovative and impactful programming.
JEI represents five distinct neighborhoods along the East Jefferson corridor and provides programming within a boundary area of 18.4 square miles. It represents approximately 42,200 residents.
From 2008-2013, Elling noted that crime in the area was out of control, with Jefferson East diving into a lot of public safety work.
“We funded extra police patrols, we have public safety AmeriCorps that go out and do safety organizing,” he said. “We also brought law enforcement and the community together to discuss problems. We also funded two domestic violence advocates.”
Around six years ago, observing there wasn’t the level of economic activity in Jefferson Chalmers it wanted, Jefferson East created a development subsidiary, East Jefferson Development Corporation. The corporation actively tries to redevelop buildings in the corridor.
In response to how he measures success at Jefferson East, Elling noted pushing crime rates down in the corridor more than 45% and helping more than 1,800 victims of domestic violence.
For more information on Jefferson East, visit jeffersoneast.org.
Alex Szwarc
Manager of communications and advancement
313.881.7514
aszwarc@warmemorial.org