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As advocates for progressive social policy, we found it rare and promising good news when New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced in April that he plans to create a city-owned grocery in East Harlem, Manhattan.
The East Harlem store will be the first of five planned city-owned stores, one in each borough. And Mamdani aims to do it right—with union labor, lower prices on staple goods, and the absence of lottery and tobacco sales. Plus, the East Harlem store will be in a predominantly Latino neighborhood and, like all the planned stores, will bring affordable food to a low-income, low-access (LILA) community.
The project marks a system change approach to tackling the nation’s affordability and food insecurity crises. It is consistent with the vision of a more democratic economy that The Democracy Collaborative, a research-led change agent where we are fellows, has been pursuing for years.
A democratic economy approach—what we like to call a Next System—means that basic economic institutions are designed to serve the public good through their normal functioning, like stores that bring healthy, affordable food to those without access. These stores support this mission through their ownership and governance structure.
Food insecurity, where people struggle to access adequate food, affects nearly 14 percent of all U.S. households. The rates are higher in Black (24 percent) and Latino (20 percent) households. In some New York City neighborhoods, food insecurity reaches 35 percent.
Municipally owned groceries are emerging as an innovative way to create greater food justice. City-owned St. Paul Supermarket in rural Kansas has operated for a dozen years. Last year, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens opened Azalea Fresh Market, as part of his pledge to see that all Atlantans are within a half-mile of affordable, fresh food by 2030.
In New York City, bodegas and dollar stores have complained of unfair competition from city-owned stores. In Atlanta, Georgia, by contrast, business is supportive. The city of Atlanta invested public funds into construction, while Savi Provisions, a locally owned grocer, owns and operates Azalea Fresh Market brand. Since Savi is an International Grocers Alliance member, Azaela receives supply chain and pricing support to bolster its sustainability.
City-owned groceries can be seen as complementary, rather than competitive to privately-owned stores. They are similar to rural electric cooperatives, which were created in rural areas where spread-out homes lacked the density to make these areas profitable enough for investor-owned utilities. Today, there are more than 800 electric cooperatives, serving forty-two million people, including 92 percent of counties with persistent poverty.
Groceries serving the public good can take forms beyond city ownership, including nonprofits and cooperatives. In Washington, D.C., the nonprofit-incubated Rosie’s Grocery, a worker-owned cooperative with minority local nonprofit ownership, is being launched to serve fresh food to LILA communities.
The aim is to align national operational strength with community accountability. This D.C. model plans to start as a delivery hub, cutting start-up costs by 50 percent, while working toward a longer-term network of multiple hubs and full-service grocery stores in the Washington, D.C. area.
The critical difference between this and the municipal-owned model is resident low- and moderate-income workers, not municipalities and private capital, will hold majority ownership and control.
It takes a village to build a Next System. At our organizations, we find cities can pursue this work even as municipal budgets are strapped for resources, and as our national government continues its destructive actions. Building the next system isn’t off in some ideal future. It’s here and now.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.