Food as a Public Good:
City-Owned Grocery Stores as a Solution to Food Insecurity
What do St. Paul, Kansas, and New York City have in common? Public grocery stores.
On the campaign trail, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposed a bold initiative to establish five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, to combat a staggering 66% spike in local food costs over the last decade. Within his first 100 days, he has moved this from a stump speech to a site plan, announcing La Marqueta in East Harlem as the flagship location.
Critics may dismiss the plan as “radical,” but the residents of St. Paul, Kansas, have a different word for it: essential. Since 2008, their municipal market has proven that when the private sector retreats, cities can step in to treat food access like a public utility, no different than water or electricity.
The St. Paul model was born of necessity. After the town spent 20 years without a grocer, newly elected Mayor Rick Giefer conducted a feasibility study and secured a $400,000 no-interest loan from the USDA. “We almost lost our high school,” Giefer recalled. “We realized that to draw people to town, we needed a food source other than a convenience store.” Other towns had the same idea. Baldwin, Florida; Erie, Kansas; and Hay Springs, Nebraska have all experimented with public grocery stores. But while St. Paul thrives, others have faltered. In Baldwin and Erie, the stores recently shuttered, leaving residents back in the food deserts they tried to escape.
So why did they fail, even with the city covering rent and waiving taxes? The answer lies in a forgotten 1936 federal law: the Robinson-Patman Act. Originally passed to prevent massive chains from using their size to bully suppliers into lower prices, the Act ensured a level playing field for “mom and pop” shops. Enforcement, however, effectively ended in 1977 under the Carter administration. The result was the “Waterbed Effect”: as big-box retailers demanded deep discounts on one side of the market, prices rose for everyone else to compensate.
Baldwin and Erie’s public stores were, in effect, “chains of one.” Without federal protection, they were forced to pay significantly higher wholesale prices than their corporate competitors, and even with zero rent, they couldn’t match the shelf prices of a Walmart miles away.
This is the trap Mayor Mamdani is trying to avoid. Rather than five isolated stores vulnerable to the same squeeze, NYC plans to leverage city-owned warehouses to purchase food in massive volumes for the entire network. By acting as its own wholesaler, the city can mimic the purchasing leverage of a major chain, securing lower prices from distributors and passing those savings on to shoppers.
The lesson from Kansas to East Harlem is the same: food access doesn’t have to be left to the market. These projects represent a refusal to let marginalized communities go hungry in the pursuit of corporate profit, and by treating food as a public good, these cities are doing more than just selling milk. They are reviving a national debate on market concentration and demanding a fair shake for the communities that need it most.