What Everyone Gets Wrong About Mamdani’s Public Grocery Store Idea

City-owned grocery stores are perhaps the most hotly debated item on New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s proposed affordability agenda. Proponents point to runaway food prices and the need to provide fresh groceries to the Big Apple’s underserved communities. Critics argue that the public sector should stay out of the food business, or else risk Soviet-style bread lines and rampant shoplifting.

The reality is more complicated than either side is letting on. Perhaps we should have a public option, if you will, for staple groceries. But to fight food insecurity, a public grocery option would need to be reinforced by policies that don’t, at first glance, seem to have much to do with food.

When studying food insecurity, scholars distinguish between “availability” (what is actually on the shelves) and “access” (what shoppers can afford). Particularly in American cities, it is overwhelmingly access, not availability, that drives food insecurity: There’s plenty of food on the shelves where food-insecure people shop; there’s just not always enough money in their pockets. That, paradoxically, can make it hard to address food insecurity with solutions that focus primarily on food. It’s actually Mamdani’s other policies—not public grocery stores—that may offer more useful policy models for municipalities looking to take a bite out of food insecurity.

The argument for public grocery stores in New York City goes something like this: A significant number of people across the five boroughs—hundreds of thousands, and up to three million by some estimates—live in so-called food deserts, or areas where fresh and affordable food is unavailable within a mile, potentially leading some low-income families to rely on more expensive or unhealthy food options. This is compounded by rising food costs, driven in part by consolidation and greed on the part of the country’s major corporate grocers. In this context, a public option for grocery stores would challenge corporate dominance and battle food insecurity, treating food as a public good and food provision as something akin to a utility, like “water, transit, or libraries,” per Alex Birnel’s argument in Jacobin: “essential infrastructure that belongs to the people.” Public grocery stores, one influential policy brief argues, could not only provide access to affordable food but act as hubs of well-paid work and “values-based” procurement of high-quality foods, turning food deserts into bountiful gardens of food abundance.

But there’s just not much evidence that food deserts—a concept that implies physical distance is the biggest impediment to an affordable and healthy diet—are a big factor in cities. This idea holds up much better in rural areas, where corporate consolidation has led to the closures of local grocery stores, forcing consumers to rely on scant local options like the Dollar General or travel prohibitively long distances for fresh food (the USDA defines a rural food desert as any area where a significant part of the population lives more than 10 miles away from a grocery store). In the countryside, the case for public grocery stores is strong—although the success rate in experiments so far is mixed.

The situation in New York City isn’t as clear. Close to 15 percent of New Yorkers are food insecure, and upward of 40 percent of the city’s families report falling short on food costs. Many of these people are clustered in the neighborhoods targeted for Mamdani’s planned public grocery stores. But their common problem is not location but income: Urban food deserts—which the USDA defines as areas where people live one mile from the nearest fresh food—don’t necessarily create food insecurity so much as they reflect income inequality. That is, food-insecure people live in food deserts because they’re less desirable residential locations with lower rent, and food-insecure people are poor.

Studies have repeatedly shown that, in American cities in general, distance to a grocer isn’t the biggest determinant of what people eat or health outcomes. One influential paper on the topic in 2019 found that supply factors only accounted for 9 percent of the nutritional inequality between low-income and high-income households. Price and preference determined diets much more than proximity did, and many consumers opted to travel further if it meant cheaper food. Or, in Mamdani’s terminology, it’s affordability that’s the core problem. Moving the grocery stores—or poor people, for that matter—doesn’t put money in pockets to buy dinner.

Another problem is that large chain grocers really do deliver low prices, and that’s a compelling benefit if you’re trying to improve access. Yes, these chains contribute to a host of problems, ranging from impeding labor organizing to possible price fixing that marginally raises some food prices. But massive economies of scale nevertheless allow grocery giants to offer most consumers the best prices for their preferred products—even factoring in corporate greed and food price inflation. For instance, studies have shown that, because of its low prices, Walmart is a reliable source of both affordable and fresh and nutritious food for food-insecure households. When combined with the prior point about proximity, this helps explain why chains like Walmarts are such tough competition for smaller, independent grocers: If being closer to your customers only matters when you can compete on price, fewer Goliath retailers will always, sadly, thump an army of Davids.

Critics of Mamdani’s plans see the above arguments and contend that we should therefore keep treating food as a private rather than a public good, and focus on market-based solutions that entice those Goliaths to help underserved communities. Why not, they say, incentivize grocery stores like Walmart to set up shop in underserved neighborhoods? In fact, New York City already invests tens of millions of dollars through the New York City Economic Development Corporation in six public markets that charge food vendors and small grocers below market-rate rent. This is a legacy from Fiorello Laguardia, whom Mamdani often cites as his biggest mayoral inspiration.

But scaling this approach to attract major grocery stores isn’t a sure bet. As for-profit entities, corporate grocery stores go where the money is. They haven’t set up shop in underserved neighborhoods for a reason, and there is no guarantee government incentives would coax them to do so or to stay if they did. Take the example of two other cities that have been flirting with the idea of public supermarkets. In Atlanta, the city for years made overtures to private grocers to open in poorer neighborhoods, but to no avail. In Chicago, the city spent over $10 million to incentivize Whole Foods to open on the city’s South Side, but the store closed after only six years. Grocery stores make huge profits but operate on tight margins, which is one reason why they often don’t open—or stay open—in poorer neighborhoods. Free market ideologues’ preference for leaving this to the private sector won’t work if the private sector can’t or doesn’t want to help.

This is a market failure, and traditionally it is considered the government’s job to step in to address market failures to serve the public good. But the dynamics of this particular market make public grocery stores a tricky proposition. Cities can’t fight the big antitrust battles needed to tackle grocery chain consolidation (that’s a matter for federal regulators). So public grocery stores would have to compete in the market as it exists today, which means trying to match corporate grocers on price and products. By doing away with rent and property taxes, the city might just be able to make this feasible in the long term by stretching their margins, but only if these stores avoid mission creep. Feel-good proposals like sourcing from more local farms or other forms of “values-based” procurement would lead to higher prices, likely making them a nonstarter.

It’s fun to imagine shopping at a grocery whose shelves and bins are overflowing with fresh and nutritious produce sourced from quaint Hudson Valley farms and ethical artisanal producers. But you don’t need to imagine it. There are already plenty of high-end grocers stocking farm-to-fork goodness at a price that is prohibitively expensive for most working people. If that’s what New York City’s municipal groceries wind up looking like, they’ll just push food-insecure people to the cheaper conventional stores where they already shop. Barring a wholesale rethinking of city budgets, municipal grocery stores would have to lean into the conventional, industrial food system to focus exclusively on providing basic staples at the lowest possible prices. (This would also reduce friction with bodegas, which make much of their money from freshly prepared food and nonessentials like lottery tickets and cigarettes.)

The good news is that New York City has in-house experience with that kind of operation. The city’s public schools serve 900,000 meals every day through its universal school breakfast and lunch program (thank you, Bill DeBlasio), managing a complex logistical operation of sourcing and warehousing and distributing staple goods efficiently at scale. The NYC school program is admirable for many reasons, including its sensitivity to the diverse tastes and nutritional needs of its students, but its budget strictures impose incredible mission discipline that requires the program to work with conventional food suppliers and make the most of basic staple foods. That the program can source the ingredients for those 900,000 meals every day with far more reliability than the operation of the B train makes us optimistic about the feasibility of municipal grocery stores if—and this is a big if—they are laser-focused on competing with the big players on cost on a narrow range of basic goods.

Cities are laboratories of democracy, and ambitious plans like municipal grocery stores are worth exploring. The only way to know whether they would work would be to try them, and the proposed $60 million price tag is reasonable, considering it’s a tiny slice of the city’s $118 billion annual budget. If it works, proponents will have a good case for stronger government intervention in urban food systems. If it doesn’t, it will have been a valuable lesson for progressive policymakers. And that may well be a decision made by consumers, who will vote with their dollars.

But it’s also worth pausing to take a broader view of food insecurity. Cheaper staples could help food-insecure consumers, but public grocery stores would have to offer much cheaper options to make a real dent in the problem, which seems unlikely without a durable and substantial public subsidy above and beyond rent and tax abatement—and, at that point, it might be more efficient to simply give food-insecure people more cash. Mamdani’s affordability agenda is needed. But his best food-security solutions lie not with food itself but with policies that stretch family budgets. Viewed this way, the debate over public grocery stores may be a red herring.

In fact, Mamdani’s free bus, rent freeze, and free early childhood education proposals—in addition to the city’s universal pre-K and universal school meals—might do the most to take pressure off household budgets, freeing up money for sufficient and nutritious food. The more money people have in their pockets and the less they have to spend on other necessities, the more they can spend on food, wherever it is that they choose to shop. These policy proposals may not be as delectable as a farmers market, but they’re more likely to feed the people.