This year, Ypsilanti will be one of the newest participants in Recast Leaders, a downtown development program led by DC-based Recast City. As said in a recent press release from Recast City, over 200 cities have participated in the program in 44 states since its founding in 2014.
Ypsilanti city government submitted an application to the program after an open selection process was announced in November 2025 for counties in Michigan. Recast City announced Jan. 27, 2026, that the application had been approved, placing Ypsilanti among six other Michigan cities to receive funding: Eastpointe, Gibraltar, Lathrup Village, Marysville and Pinckney. The program has received funding in Michigan from the Michigan Municipal League and the Detroit-based Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation.
Elize Jekabson, Ypsilanti's downtown development executive director, said in an email that the application process was straightforward.
"The City had to make its case on why Recast City could be a good fit for our community," Jekabson said, adding that the Ypsilanti Downtown Development Authority initially was going to take the lead. "But we recognized that there are areas outside of the immediate DDA districts, including Water Street, that should be considered when talking about attracting or retaining scalable small manufacturing businesses. To expand it beyond our boundaries, we partnered up with the City to apply on behalf of both organizations."
Recast City's press release said that the 10-month program was set to start in February 2026, but Jekabson said that it had not yet started as of Feb. 23, 2026.
The program's model for downtown revitalization focuses on placing small, often maker-based businesses in empty storefronts. Recast City, led by author, founder and CEO Ilana Preuss, also provides consulting in collaboration with three or four community representatives. Recast City is described on its Facebook page as a consulting firm, and Preuss refers to it as a firm in her 2021 book "Recast Your City: How to Save Your Downtown with Small-Scale Manufacturing." Preuss clarified in an interview that she sees Recast City as a small business.
Preuss said that similar organizations often struggle with a lack of communication with the cities they seek to improve.
"What we do is we flip it on its head and we work with communities to say, 'Okay, what do you want to achieve in this place,'" Preuss said. "'How do you want to experience this place on Wednesday at 3 o'clock or Saturday at five?' Let's paint that picture for ourselves and let's talk about, 'Who do we want to make sure is benefiting from that?'"
Preuss, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, said that her mother's abilities in textile arts and handiwork inspired her career trajectory.
"My mother was always making things," Preuss said. "She sewed, she knit, she taught all of us how to use a drill and hang blinds... Tools and making things and projects were always a part of what we did. I got really involved in the makers movement 15 years ago and loved what they were doing to educate people that, you know, everybody can make things."
When asked about the issue of gentrification, Preuss said she defines it as money coming into communities, which is often desperately needed.
"We want to do it in a way that doesn't displace people from the community who are there now," Preuss said. "So a lot of what we look at is, 'How are we making sure that the programs we create or the policies that we pass benefit the people who live there, first and foremost?'"
Ypsilanti has historically required references to be submitted when private contractors are interested in submitting a bid, and the Michigan Municipal League recommends that local governments check with past clients of consulting firms, but Jekabson said that the Ypsilanti city government had not spoken to other local governments that had participated before applying to the program.
Preuss said that Columbia, Missouri, is a past participant in the program. "Once they interviewed business owners, they found that there was a huge demand for our commercial shared kitchen. They outgrew their first base within a year ... they got funding and grants to build out in a second space. They have 51 businesses working out of that space now."
To supplement in-person sales, Recast City also aims to help local businesses build their online sales.
"Even going into the pandemic, we saw changes in retail happening, especially in smaller cities and towns where major retail chains were already consolidating their footprints," Preuss said. "The pandemic just expedited that process where folks really looked more at only their prime locations. Anything that didn't already have a ton of foot traffic wasn't going to survive."
Jekabson said that they hope the program can help Ypsilanti fill long-term commercial vacancies.
"We also want to be able to retain existing businesses in the City of Ypsilanti when they find that they need to grow," Jekabson said.
More information about Recast City can be found on its website.
