{"id":74614,"date":"2025-07-19T05:44:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T05:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/74614\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T05:44:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T05:44:13","slug":"capitalism-not-socialist-grocers-can-fix-nycs-food-woes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/74614\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism, not socialist grocers, can fix NYC’s food woes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Of all his radical ideas, Zohran Mamdani\u2019s proposed government-owned supermarkets <\/a>exemplify his socialist core.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right about the city\u2019s grocery problem: Too many New Yorkers lack affordable fresh food-shopping options in their neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

But he doesn\u2019t seem to know that public grocery stores have already been tried, and have failed, across the country \u2014 or that the private sector can solve the problem, if government helped rather than hindered it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn if you visit the Andrew Jackson Houses, a public-housing project in The Bronx.<\/p>\n

Longtime resident Danny Barber, president of the Citywide Council of public-housing tenants, has every reason to support Mamdani\u2019s proposal:\u00a0It\u2019s as much as a mile-long walk from the project\u2019s core to the nearest markets \u2014 and many of his neighbors are elderly or disabled.<\/p>\n

Several bodegas are closer, but they charge on average 17% more than supermarkets for similar items.<\/p>\n

But Barber dismisses the idea of city-owned grocery stores.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes you think the city could run something as complicated as a supermarket?\u201d he asks, citing a long list of government failures.<\/p>\n

Phil Lempert, an industry analyst known as the \u201csupermarket guru,\u201d agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cCity-owned and run supermarkets will never succeed,\u201d Lempert said. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a very complicated business that runs on volume and has an average of 1.5% to 2% net profit. It\u2019s about efficiencies\u00a0and operations, not something that local governments understand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Kansas City has sunk millions into a failing city-owned supermarket that can\u2019t keep its shelves stocked. <\/p>\n

The Washington Post reported this week, and uber-left-wing Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson<\/a> has backed away from a promise similar to Mamdani\u2019s.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t expect a Mayor Mamdani to reduce those. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Barber says he\u2019s seeing the private, not public, sector stepping up to bring cheaper groceries to low-income \u201cfood deserts\u201d like his housing project.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With the right city policies, those for-profit businesses could do even more.<\/p>\n

Low-income New Yorkers lack many resources, but they do have home computers and smartphones \u2014 and they\u2019re using them to order groceries online.<\/p>\n

In the Jackson Houses and across the city, Amazon Prime, Fresh Direct and BJ\u2019s Wholesale Club have proven willing and able to deliver directly to public-housing residents, sometimes right to their apartment doors. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI see them,\u201d says Barber, \u201ccoming with fresh mangoes\u201d \u2014 a modern marvel in a poor neighborhood where access to produce has been limited.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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These competitive enterprises offer low prices thanks to their high volumes.<\/p>\n

In an ideal world, New York City Housing Authority properties<\/a> \u2014 which typically include large open street-facing spaces \u2014 would build low-cost chain groceries right on their campuses to solve residents\u2019 food-access woes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But NYCHA has actually barred commercial businesses from its properties for the last 80 years \u2014 even going so far as to demolish the 599 stores that once stood on its sites.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI would love that,\u201d Barber says. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But even without such a reform, the city could help bring privately provided groceries to the lowest-income residents by capitalizing on online shopping.<\/p>\n

Surprisingly, former city comptroller and mayoral also-ran Scott Stringer<\/a> has proposed a common-sense approach to doing so, via \u201cShared Grocery Delivery Centers\u201d in public-housing projects.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In exchange, he said, the city would establish and operate a single grocery drop-off location to ease deliveries.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not wrong that delivery fees and order minimums can be daunting for low-income residents: $14.99 for same-day BJ\u2019s delivery (waived for those paying a $100 annual membership charge), $7.99 and a $35 order minimum for Fresh Direct.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The central site would reduce the grocers\u2019 costs and improve safety for their delivery workers, while broadening residents\u2019 access to affordable, healthy food. Win-win-win.<\/p>\n

But that would mean leveraging the capitalist private sector \u2014 rather than dreaming of a utopian socialist alternative.<\/p>\n

Howard Husock is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and author of the forthcoming book \u201cThe Projects: A New History of Public Housing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Of all his radical ideas, Zohran Mamdani\u2019s proposed government-owned supermarkets exemplify his socialist core. He\u2019s right about the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":74615,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[9127,5229,46007,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,36798,1269,10452,24590,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-74614","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-amazon-prime","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-food-delivery","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-newyork","14":"tag-newyorkcity","15":"tag-ny","16":"tag-nyc","17":"tag-nycha","18":"tag-opinion","19":"tag-socialism","20":"tag-supermarkets","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa","27":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114878314170602884","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}