In a city and surrounding areas still plagued with erupting foreclosures, the local CEM Business Association (with interests of Cornerstone Village, East English Village and Morningside Neighborhood at heart) is busy doing something about the fall-out.
Banks in Detroit’s East Warren Avenue District foreclosure epicenter already own over 1,300 hundred properties in an area where 7% of homes went into foreclosure in 2009. In a city where abandoned buildings are common, vacant and boarded up homes in East Warren are among the few that are challenged by bring back the pride signs on the lawns of neighboring middle class homes occupied by proud owners. Very much the same applies in the local business district, where established older and newer businesses stand out proudly against the shuttered storefronts of those whose owners could not stand the pace.
The driver behind these regeneration efforts is Bill Swanson of CEM Business Association. He spends his days persuading new businesses to move into vacant commercial space as part of the association’s mission to push crime and neglect back street by street until it is gone completely.
“If they see an attractive commercial area they’re more likely to feel comfortable in their own neighborhood and buy a house here too,” CEM’s Swanson reasons. That way he hopes to achieve a double whammy.
A further challenge faced by the Cornerstone Village, East English Village and Morningside Neighborhood Business Association is its proximity to the nearby upmarket Grosse Pointe shopping hub that attracts Detroit residents to its high end stores not found elsewhere in the area, and mops up just over 50% of CEM residents’ buying power in the process.
Helen Broughton of Next Detroit Neighborhood Initiative thinks that this has got to change. “You can easily go to Grosse Pointe, but I think that we as residents need to make a concerted effort to choose to shop local,” she told me. “Shop local starts to mean staying on this side of the border.”
CEM Business Association was founded in 2007 with just 10 locals – today it is bolstered by 45 paid-up members and benefits from active support from nearly 80 local businesses. Most impressively, it logged 3,400 volunteer hours last year, most of which were spent on clean-up work and beautification projects.
According to Robinson much of the credit is due to the volunteer bag-and-broom brigade who clean up every day so that local businesses look more inviting. ‘People here look at that,” he told me. “The customers see the outside before they see the inside.”
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