Cleveland City Council Member Jenny Spencer will not seek re-election for her Ward 15 seat when her term ends in 2025.
“This has absolutely been the honor of a lifetime,” Spencer told Ideastream Tuesday ahead of her Wednesday afternoon announcement to the public. “I am so grateful that I had a chance to do it and that I could serve the community, and I'm still going to be here for the next 14 months.”
Spencer’s announcement comes as city council is in the thick of its once-in-a-decade redistricting process. The council will lose two of its 17 seats due to population loss.
Spencer said redistricting had “no bearing whatsoever” on her decision, but that she wanted to give potential candidates the opportunity to launch their campaigns ahead of next fall’s election.
“This decision is really personal to me, and I made it many, many months ago,” Spencer said. “So while I acknowledge that redistricting could change the boundaries of the ward, it didn't impact my decision not to run.”
Ward 15 currently includes Edgewater, Cudell, Detroit Shoreway and parts of the Ohio City and Stockyard neighborhoods, though those boundaries may change with redistricting. Spencer said she hopes to keep neighborhoods more whole with new ward maps, a sentiment Council President Blaine Griffin has also expressed. Spencer and the rest of council will vote on those maps, which have yet to be made public.
Griffin has said he expects to finalize the maps by the end of the year so council members can begin their campaigns next year. All council seats are up for election in fall 2025.
It’s unclear how Spencer’s departure will affect the remaining council members who may wish to maintain their seats in the upcoming election.
Spencer’s near West Side ward has a relatively stable population compared to many East Side communities that have lost residents in the last decade. Griffin has said council must balance population density and geographic area but is beholden to requirements laid out by the city charter, such as a population of 25,000 per council member, plus or minus a small margin. That means West Side communities, like Spencer’s, are likely at less of a risk of losing seats.
Spencer reflects on her time in council
Spencer told Ideastream she plans to finish out her term and will not appoint a successor.
The first-term council member, who is a 15-year resident of the ward, said she is most proud of her work around affordable housing, citing tax abatement reform early in her tenure.
“Affordable housing has always been my top priority, and it continues to be so,” Spencer said. “There's various irons in the fire with projects that need support and cultivation to bring additional affordable housing to the ward. So that's something I'm really focused on.”
Spencer sits at the helm of one of the most economically diverse wards, with rapidly thriving neighborhoods like Ohio City and Detroit-Shoreway, as well as low-income pockets in those same and other neighborhoods in the district.
"We need we need different housing, typologies for all types of families. So I think that's going to be a really rich and interesting challenge. I think when I look at the ward overall, I think our commercial corridors still need a lot of love. ... Some people even think we're fully gentrified, which is not the case at all."
Three in five Ward 15 residents live at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, and about two in five households live in housing that exceeds 30% of their gross household income, according to data from the Center for Community Solutions.
Aside from housing work, Spencer said she is also proud of being one of the council members who championed public comment at city council’s Monday night meetings. Council members voted in 2021 to establish a public comment period for the first time.
“I know that every Monday night we're going to be hearing from residents, and I encourage my residents all the time come down and talk to us,” Spencer said. “Thinking about our communities, having that time, those opportunities to hear from that citywide perspective and from residents across the city has absolutely made me better equipped to do this job.”
Spencer has not yet decided her next steps after she leaves office.
Prior to assuming her role as a city council member, she worked as the managing director for the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, now called the Northwest Neighborhoods Community Development Corporation. With a political science degree from the Ohio State University and a Master’s degree in public policy and urban planning from the Harvard Kennedy School, she said she plans to continue to do work in public service and community advocacy.
As one of five women on council's 17-member body, Spencer said she hopes more women consider a bid for the upcoming city council class. She said she is happy to speak to anyone considering a run for her or any other seat in fall 2025.
