Capitalism, not socialist grocers, can fix NYC’s food woes
Of all his radical ideas, Zohran Mamdani’s proposed government-owned supermarkets exemplify his socialist core.
He’s right about the city’s grocery problem: Too many New Yorkers lack affordable fresh food-shopping options in their neighborhoods.
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But he doesn’t seem to know that public grocery stores have already been tried, and have failed, across the country — or that the private sector can solve the problem, if government helped rather than hindered it.
That’s what you’ll learn if you visit the Andrew Jackson Houses, a public-housing project in The Bronx.
Longtime resident Danny Barber, president of the Citywide Council of public-housing tenants, has every reason to support Mamdani’s proposal: It’s as much as a mile-long walk from the project’s core to the nearest markets — and many of his neighbors are elderly or disabled.
Several bodegas are closer, but they charge on average 17% more than supermarkets for similar items.
But Barber dismisses the idea of city-owned grocery stores.
“What makes you think the city could run something as complicated as a supermarket?” he asks, citing a long list of government failures.
Phil Lempert, an industry analyst known as the “supermarket guru,” agrees.
“City-owned and run supermarkets will never succeed,” Lempert said.
“This is a very complicated business that runs on volume and has an average of 1.5% to 2% net profit. It’s about efficiencies and operations, not something that local governments understand.”
Indeed, Kansas City has sunk millions into a failing city-owned supermarket that can’t keep its shelves stocked.
The Washington Post reported this week, and uber-left-wing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has backed away from a promise similar to Mamdani’s.
What’s more, says New York supermarket magnate John Catsimatidis, city government itself pushes up food prices with its high minimum wage, taxes, congestion-pricing fees and other required costs.
Don’t expect a Mayor Mamdani to reduce those.
Meanwhile, Barber says he’s seeing the private, not public, sector stepping up to bring cheaper groceries to low-income “food deserts” like his housing project.
With the right city policies, those for-profit businesses could do even more.
Low-income New Yorkers lack many resources, but they do have home computers and smartphones — and they’re using them to order groceries online.
In the Jackson Houses and across the city, Amazon Prime, Fresh Direct and BJ’s Wholesale Club have proven willing and able to deliver directly to public-housing residents, sometimes right to their apartment doors.
“I see them,” says Barber, “coming with fresh mangoes” — a modern marvel in a poor neighborhood where access to produce has been limited.
These competitive enterprises offer low prices thanks to their high volumes.
In an ideal world, New York City Housing Authority properties — which typically include large open street-facing spaces — would build low-cost chain groceries right on their campuses to solve residents’ food-access woes.
But NYCHA has actually barred commercial businesses from its properties for the last 80 years — even going so far as to demolish the 599 stores that once stood on its sites.
Offering vacant, tax-abated city-owned land on a NYCHA campus would open cost-effective paths for chain grocery stores and pharmacies to operate in the projects.
“I would love that,” Barber says.
But even without such a reform, the city could help bring privately provided groceries to the lowest-income residents by capitalizing on online shopping.
Surprisingly, former city comptroller and mayoral also-ran Scott Stringer has proposed a common-sense approach to doing so, via “Shared Grocery Delivery Centers” in public-housing projects.
Stringer called on NYCHA to set up a program allowing delivery services to compete for the right to serve public-housing tenants based on their willingness to waive membership and delivery fees.
In exchange, he said, the city would establish and operate a single grocery drop-off location to ease deliveries.
He’s not wrong that delivery fees and order minimums can be daunting for low-income residents: $14.99 for same-day BJ’s delivery (waived for those paying a $100 annual membership charge), $7.99 and a $35 order minimum for Fresh Direct.
City-negotiated lower rates for deliveries to secure, NYPD-protected central community sites would be a practical means of actually getting lower-cost groceries to low-income New Yorkers.
The central site would reduce the grocers’ costs and improve safety for their delivery workers, while broadening residents’ access to affordable, healthy food. Win-win-win.
But that would mean leveraging the capitalist private sector — rather than dreaming of a utopian socialist alternative.
Howard Husock is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and author of the forthcoming book “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing.”
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