Long time no talk. (Note: this post will be further edited for grammar and clarity)

Currently, Cleveland has 17 members of Cleveland City Council, councilmen, that each represent a designated geographic area known as a ward.

Because of City Rules and city’s declining population, the ward boundaries are being redrawn in a relatively opaque process.

Before the proposed boundaries are released, I wanted to try drawing my own, so here is how I did, my proposed ward boundaries, and what I learned in the process.

Why redraw the boundaries?

The City Charter requires the number of councilmen to depend on the city’s population taken during the Census every 10 years.

The guidelines are specified in Chapter 5 of the City’s Charter sections 25 and 25.1, both of which state:

“The wards so formed shall be as nearly equal in population as may be fair and equitable, composed of contiguous and compact territory, and bounded by natural boundaries or street lines” Notably, Section 25.1, which deals specifically with the reapportionment, redrawing of the ward boundaries, omits be fair and equitable portion.

a May 2024 Press Release from Cleveland City Council mentions census tracks (sic) , reviews and compiling and analyzing GIS data” but there are no other public mention of criteria that are used. The city did hold public meetings in October.

They are being redrawn for the 2025 election, the first election after the decennial Census Results were published. The 2020 Census results on a city-wide level were released in August 2021 before the last election but that three months was not enough time to make new ward boundaries. That said, it’s fair to ask why the city waited until 2023 to redraw the ward boundaries.

My goals for making my own proposed boundaries:

  • I found the existing ward boundaries last made in 2013 to not be very compact nor bounded by natural boundaries.

  • I wondered how difficult it could be to make a new boundaries that had be more cohesive to align with neighborhood boundaries.

  • Learn more about the process.

How I did it:

Dave’s Redistricting is free software to create redistricting maps in the USA and was extremely useful. Dave’s calculates the population and keeps a running tab of how many political subdivisions that you have within your selected geographic area.

(insert the screenshot displaying the interface, where you quickly view the population of each current section; draw an area by particular census tracks or census blocks.

With that in mind, I hadn’t looked at the existing boundaries before drawing new boundaries and I started from a blank canvas; I did not modify the existing ward boundaries.

I don’t know if there’s any rule prohibiting their use to draw the ward boundaries but I used census blocks to give more me flexibility. Then I drew.

What I learned from this:

The councilpeople who will be forced to run in an area that with another incumbent (someone already elected) will likely always fall to councilpeople whose wards are towards the center of the city.

More importantly, the populations of each ward are extremely similar: I made a couple drafts of the map and compared it to the 2013 ward boundaries. I noticed the each ward’s population in the 2013/2014 ward boundaries were extremely close to each other. Each ward’s population in the 2013 map ranged from 22,240 (Ward 4) to 24,509 (ward 13); all wards’ populations were within 5% of 23,342 which is the average of (2010 Census for the city of Clevelandwas 396,815; divided by 17 (wards). (Ward population data is from NeoCando at CWRU)

Thus, I need to go back to the drawing board.

Now knowing that Cleveland City Council would likely only pass (into law) a set of ward boundaries whose ward populations were within 5% of the average population of a ward, I made another version of the map, what you see here. The city of Cleveland’s population according to the 2020 Census was 372,624. Divide that by 15 wards, averages to 24,841 and if we want all wards to be within 5% of that average, each ward’s population must fall between roughly 23,600 and 26,000.

I used freeways (just south of the Opportunity Corridor),I-71, the innerbelt, i-90, natural features like Doan Brook, the gap between east 67th and Marion Motley Park (Kingsbury Run and the Sidaway Bridge ), the lowlying area (where the zoo is located) and changes in landuse, railways. I didn’t realize until finishing it that my proposed boundaries for Slife and Kazy were extremely similar to their existing wards; population in that area changed very little between 2010 and 2020.

As noted by Nick Castele in this Signal Cleveland piece, the city’s population loss between the 2010 and 2020 Census was primarily on the East side, ( The City Planning Department has several maps highlighting the population change. Because each ward’s population needs to be very similar (in this case between 23,600 and 26,000) you’ll need to cover more land than before to reach the desired ward’s population, consequently leading to larger boundaries and on the East side..

View my proposed Ward Boundaries for 2024

(the precinct block just south of garden valley avenue cuts across 2 neighborhoods, slavic village and garden valley. )