Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise is not nearly as outlandish as his critics suggest.
When mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani proposed opening city-owned grocery stores to combat rising food prices, his opponents dismissed it as radical “socialist” policy. To many, the idea conjures images of DMV-style bureaucracy taking over a private-sector function — yielding long lines and wilted produce.
But this criticism reveals how little attention we pay to what already surrounds us. Far from being radical, city-owned grocery stores would represent a logical next step in New York City’s century-long commitment to food access through public-private partnerships. The public sector already operates and supports a diverse network of food retail that has been hiding in plain sight for generations — in large part because it works well and without much fanfare.
The question isn’t whether the city can run grocery stores; it’s what the next generation of municipal food retail will look like.
Government grocery stores in context
There’s already a prominent American example of government grocery stores we ignore at our peril. The largest and longest-running network of such stores in the U.S. is the military commissary system, dating back to the 1800s. Commissaries are supermarkets operated by the U.S. Department of Defense to provide affordable groceries to servicemembers and their families. The Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) runs about 235 stores worldwide and 177 on bases in North America, with annual revenues of $4 billion.
These stores are fully owned and operated by the federal government, staffed by government employees or contractors, and offer groceries at cost plus a small surcharge (about 5%) to cover overhead. They sell food that averages 25% below private supermarkets due to the small markup, reduced overhead and economies of scale. They don’t turn a profit, with all nominal earnings from the surcharge reinvested.
I’ve heard no one describe them as a dangerous socialist or even communist experiment.
In New York City, there is a commissary at Fort Hamilton, in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. This market has 193 ratings on Google Maps averaging 4.6 stars — demonstrating that the government can operate efficient, popular grocery stores that customers genuinely appreciate. The commissary model proves that large-scale government food retail isn’t just possible; it’s already successful.
Public markets
When it comes to serving civilians, New York City has been in the food retail business for nearly a century, building and refining a sophisticated infrastructure.
Beginning in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia built a network of city-run indoor markets to provide sanitary spaces for the food pushcarts that clogged city streets. Six of these LaGuardia markets still operate today. They are owned and managed by the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which keeps vendor rents below market rate to enable lower food prices.
Each market reflects the character of its neighborhood: Arthur Avenue Market is a center for Italian traditions in the Bronx; La Marqueta celebrates East Harlem’s Latino culture and hosts an incubator kitchen for food entrepreneurs; and Certo Market in Brooklyn contains kosher vendors and a kosher supermarket serving the neighborhood’s Hasidic Jewish community. These markets demonstrate the City’s long-standing role in food retail infrastructure and its ability to adapt to current needs.
Publicly supported supermarkets
Even among traditional grocery stores, the city has developed increasingly sophisticated ways to support food retail through partnerships that leverage both public resources and private expertise.
The Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program subsidizes new and enlarged supermarkets in underserved neighborhoods through zoning incentives for developers who incorporate a supermarket in their projects and tax incentives to supermarket operators. To receive these incentives, FRESH supermarkets must reserve 30% of their space for perishable foods and have at least 500 square feet for produce. The program currently doesn’t require affordability standards or even SNAP acceptance — criteria that would be worth adding to ensure public investment yields social and health benefits. Since 2011, New York City has subsidized 27 stores through 25-year tax abatements worth $29.2 million to date.
The City also functions as a supermarket landlord, using its commercial space to reduce real-estate barriers to conventional supermarkets. For example, Associated Supermarkets leases space at Williamsburg Houses, a Housing Authority development in Brooklyn. In the Rockaways, Queens, Ocean Bay Community Development Corporation partnered with the non-profit Asian Americans for Equality to develop a supermarket on NYCHA land.
Other U.S. cities are implementing similar strategies. For example, Madison, Wisconsin is purchasing 24,000 square feet of ground floor retail space and offering a 15-year lease to Maurer’s Market, a well-regarded family-owned Wisconsin grocer. The new store is slated to open in 2025, showing how cities can use their real estate assets to enable grocery retail. Atlanta’s economic development arm, Invest Atlanta, approved up to $8.1 million in public funding to facilitate the opening of two new grocery stores in neighborhoods with limited food retail. These funds help build out locations, purchase equipment and inventory, and cover operating costs for stores operated by private company Savi Provisions. Municipal involvement in grocery retail is becoming mainstream urban policy.
Publicly supported greenmarkets, mobile vendors, digital platforms and pantries
The government’s involvement in food retail runs still deeper. New York City has one of the largest farmers’ market networks in the U.S., with more than 120 markets across the city during the growing season. While vendors are private farmers, the “market” itself is a product of public investment and facilitation. The City provides land and supports operational costs and enables markets to accept federal SNAP benefits by subsidizing EBT card readers. The Department of Health distributes Health Bucks — $2 coupons for fresh produce purchased at farmers’ markets, making them more affordable for low-income New Yorkers.
New York City also supports mobile vending of healthy food. The city’s Green Carts program allocates 1,000 pushcart permits to vendors who agree to sell within designated neighborhoods that need more access to affordable fresh produce. These permits create entrepreneurial opportunities for the vendors while addressing food access gaps.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Groceries to Go program helps low-income New Yorkers with chronic diseases purchase healthy groceries online. Participants receive monthly credits and a 50% discount on fresh produce through an e-commerce platform featuring neighborhood supermarkets.
Not least, New York City funds more than 700 food pantries and soup kitchens citywide, ranging from small operations in church basements to large supermarket-sized pantries. As food insecurity has increased, these have evolved from emergency providers to essential and permanent parts of the local food environment. The City also supports the distribution of prepared meals to seniors at home and in community centers, provides food at homeless shelters, and supports a range of other food distribution programs.
Designing new food retail
Mamdani has proposed a network of government-run stores, which wouldn’t be a radical idea. But rather than choosing between approaches, New York City could weave together the best features of existing programs into new, integrated models. The most innovative might combine the bulk purchasing power of a public commissary with Greenmarket’s regional sourcing, creating stores that offer both the cost savings of institutional procurement and the freshness of local farms. Mobile Green Carts could serve as neighborhood extensions of fixed public markets, bringing affordable produce directly to residents while maintaining connections to larger retail hubs.
The City could also expand its food pantry infrastructure to serve a wider range of low-income customers on a sliding scale, transforming emergency food assistance into a permanent affordability program. FRESH program incentives could be enhanced with mandatory affordability requirements. Instead of simply leasing commercial spaces on City land to private supermarkets, the city could also contract with operators to maintain control over pricing and accessibility. Online food retail programs like Groceries to Go could evolve to connect regional producers directly to neighborhood pickup points, creating a city-managed supply chain that bypasses traditional distribution markups.
This synthesis approach could also incorporate the elements of successful features from other business models and public programs, such as sliding scale grocers that adjust prices based on income, stores dedicated to participants who receive federal assistance that provide nutrition education alongside food access, and food-as-medicine programs that offer groceries tailored to the needs of those with diet-related diseases.
Why municipal groceries could well make sense
More than 1.4 million New Yorkers are food insecure — meaning they lack sufficient access to affordable, healthy food — and nearly half of households with children are at risk of food insecurity. A big reason for this is the high cost of living in New York and the high cost of food itself. Groceries in the New York City metropolitan area are more expensive than the national average and have increased in price rapidly in recent years, growing by 65.8% from 2012-2013 to 2022-2023, compared to 48.8% nationally.
In a city where grocery prices place enormous strain on working families, municipal food retail isn’t some crazy policy; it’s an extension of what the city is already doing. When markets fail to meet basic needs, government has both the capability and responsibility to act. We do it with housing, transportation, health care and food — complementing, not replacing, private options. A city that operates one of the world’s largest transit systems, manages 1,700 parks and playgrounds, runs libraries and schools in every neighborhood, and delivers some of the best-tasting drinking water in the nation can certainly sell groceries.
The infrastructure, expertise and successful models already exist, but they just need to be refined and scaled up to meet the unique needs and tastes of the city’s neighborhoods. That’ll take vision, intelligent execution — and the willingness to face down the fearmongers.