Our team at Cleveland Owns watched the 2025 Cleveland municipal election closely. Not only are they an important barometer of trust (or mistrust) Cleveland residents have in local government, but also the policy issues candidates campaign on serve as an important indicator of what’s at stake for Cleveland residents.
Many candidates for Cleveland City Council in 2025 did something we’ve never seen in Cleveland politics: They ran on platforms that centered cooperative and public ownership. Candidates called for co-op housing and city-owned grocery stores, a People’s Budget (aka participatory budgeting), and city support for worker co-ops. Community land trusts and social housing development on city-owned land got some love too.
These forms of economic democracy – when working class people have a say over the economic institutions and decisions that affect their lives -- are policies we support at Cleveland Owns. Each is part of a broader project of transforming our economic system away from racial capitalism and towards a solidarity economy. That’s the work we pursue when we incubate worker co-ops like People’s Plumbing or housing co-ops like the one we’re trying to get started in MidTown. Individual projects like these and policy change work together to bring economic democracy to life.
That’s one reason we co-hosted a non-partisan candidate forum for candidates for Cleveland City Council in July 2025. Moderator Trevelle Harp welcomed 15 candidates for a substantive conversation about municipal economic policy – city expenditures, the city budget, housing, etc. Trevelle asked clear, specific questions so folks in the room and online could understand where candidates stood on them. You can watch the full event here and read a detailed account from La Villa here.
One way we measure success at Cleveland Owns is how the values we believe in – interdependence, economic democracy, racial justice, and more - show up in public life in Cleveland, especially in the stories we tell about the economy and in the policies that govern economic life. We want our values, and the policies related to them, to flourish, ultimately crowding out the ideas and policies that today predominate in economic policymaking, such as trickle-down economics and bootstrap mythology. Behind policies like these are harmful stories about what drives our economy. These narratives emaciate our political imagination and make Cleveland residents and policy makers feel stuck in what we call the ‘trickle down trap’ – the belief there is no alternative but to rely on trickle-down economic policies that hand public money to billionaires. These policies have failed over and over, but still get traction with the ruling class. Many voters feel there is no alternative.
The 2025 Cleveland municipal race shows what’s possible is changing quickly. In 2025, economic democracy policies seemed much more prevalent in Cleveland City Council candidate policy platforms compared with those of 2021. We like to think Cleveland Owns’ seven years of organizing and incubating had something to do with that. Our allies have ramped up their organizing for economic alternatives as well. And no doubt the national momentum behind Zohran Mamdani’s electric campaign for Mayor of New York City in summer 2025 put wind in everyone’s sail. In Cleveland, some candidates with the most ambitious agendas won their races in Cleveland, and others lost after competitive runs.
Something bigger is happening here too. Rising costs, the climate crisis, and a wave of fascistic repression are radicalizing people across the country. Working class voters like those in Cleveland feel less and less invested in a system that funnels wealth from the bottom to the top. They are more open to alternatives. A slew of candidates in Cleveland running on those alternatives in 2025 reflect this larger trend.
So while racial capitalism grinds on, teetering under the weight of its contradictions, at Cleveland Owns we’ll continue to do our part to make the case that a better world is possible.
- Jonathan
Photo: Loh