New York City – Where to pick up is a food group and ovens are for storing clothes- Can be quick in the supermarket income. If he wins the general elections in November, Zohran Mamdani, the new democratic nominee for mayor, has said he will build A network of municipal, affordable supermarkets, one in each of the five districts of the city. According to Mamdani, the city could help pay for the rental and operating costs of the stores by taxing the rich, and the stores will not try to make a profit, so that they can sell food for wholesale costs. In the vision, Mamdani has been laid out in one campaign videoThe mission of the stores would combat “price guts” by offering lower prices than company stores.
If Mamdani can get this done – a huge whenGiven the economic considerations, as critics point quickly – it will be the first time in American history that the size of a city of New York has ordered its own supermarkets. New Yorkers are in favor of the idea: two -thirds of them, including 54 percent of Republicans, support public messages, according to a Mars survey Through the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank. But because nothing exactly like Mamdani’s plan was once tried in a large city, no one can be sure whether it can really sell more affordable food, let alone tackle food insecurity and health differences in the city. What Mamdani has suggested is an $ 60 million experiment, with New Yorkers as test subjects.
A few other major American cities try out similar plans, but what is not very precedent for Mamdani’s plan comes mainly from the countryside of America. A handful of cities have opened municipal messages, especially because they had no choice: small cities once trusted mother-and-pop stores, but These disappear While dollar shops are spreading and big-box retailers in larger national cities Monopolize the wholesale. Without a supermarket, residents or the city must leave for food or trust at convenience stores and dollar shops, which do not have many healthy options. In 2018, the city of Baldwin, Florida (current population) lost his only supermarket when the local Iga closed. It became a food desert: the next clearest supermarket was 10 miles away-no simple trip for older adults who do not drive or for people without a car. The mayor presented a store for municipal, which was opened the following year. In Kansas, the cities of St. Paul (population 603) and Erie (population 1,019) started their own supermarkets in 2008 and 2021. St. Paul had not had a supermarket respectively Since 1985.
The fate of these shops and their hometown are varied. Baldwin Market became a lifeline for many residents, especially during the pandemic. But it had difficulty breaking and closed in 2024. Now the city largely trusts a handful of convenience stores and a dollar general, because it is waiting for the rumor opening of a new private supermarket. Erie Market had difficulty balancing his books in the same way. Operation were a challenge; The store sometimes filled food and the cooled part lost electricity after a thunderstorm. Last year, the city rented it to a private ownerwho still has to reopen the store.
St. Paul Supermarket, on the other hand, has been as a completely municipal supermarket since 2013 (it was financed by one Community development group) and shows no signs of closing. His success is attributed to community buy-in. The local population was motivated by the desire to preserve their city, for fear that the lack of a supermarket would chase away the current residents and scare potential new ones. “It is a retention strategy, but it is also a recruitment strategy,” said Rial Carver, the program leader of the national supermarket initiative of Kansas State University.
The primary goal of a municipal ownership store is to get food for people who need it. But the city will have to decide which food is striking and, inevitably, will be confronted with questions about how those choices influence the diet or health of potential customers. (Imagine that the criticism with which a Mamdani administration can be confronted for subsidizing cheetos or in that regard, organic, gluten-free cheese clouds.) Theoretically, getting people better access to any form of food, Craig Willingham, the director of Cuny’s urban food policy, me. But there are so few examples of successful municipal supermarkets that there is virtually no research into their health effects.
Research into the health effects of opening a private Owned by supermarket in a food desert has had mixed results. A continuous study From a neighborhood in the lighting of food in Pittsburgh, it has discovered that after a supermarket, residents in general fewer calories consumed, mostly added sugar, but also less full grains, fruit and vegetables. A 2018 study In a Bronx -neighborhood with few supermarkets, the opening of a new supermarket connected to residents who eat more fruit and vegetables and fewer soft drinks, salty snacks and pastries consumed, but their expenses for unhealthy food increased with their purchases of healthy.
Only a new supermarket Do not change food habitsAccording to a study from 2019 under the leadership of Hunt Allcott, an economist at Stanford. “People shop in the new store, but they buy the same types of groceries they had bought before,” Allcott told me. What helps people push to buy healthier food, he said, is making those foods affordable – while they also tax unhealthy items such as soft drinks.
With so little background information to continue, it is impossible to say how Mamdani’s experiment will take place in a large city – or whether it will even get off the ground. New York differs from the sites of other experiments with municipal driving construction, not only in its size and density, but also in the general abundance of supermarkets. Proximity is not the main reason why people cannot get food, healthy or otherwise, allcott said. From 2013 to 2023, the amount of money that New Yorkers have spent on groceries Almost 66 percent rose—FAR higher than the national average. The poverty rate of the city – a metric based on the price of a minimal diet – is almost twice that of the national average; from 2020 to 2023, One in three New Yorkers used food pantries. In Chelsea, a neighborhood in Manhattan that is known for its luxurious high -rise buildings and is also home to a large residential project, some residents prefer to take the train to New Jersey to buy groceries than shopping at the expensive local supermarkets, Willingham said.
Supermarkets are tough things. The profit margins are as slim as 1 to 3 percent and the prices are largely determined by suppliers, who tend to privilege the volume. A single grocer (or the small network that Mamdani proposes) will not be as good as a large chain. And running a store is difficult, Carver told me: a manager must be agile and adapt to the requirements of the customer, skills to which municipal authorities are not exactly known. In New York there is at least a reason to expect that public messages would not be cheaper.
Mamdani (whose campaign has not responded to a request for comment) has acknowledged that the city government of New York may not be cut for storing boards. If the pilot plan does not work, he said on the podcast Just English Last week he will not try to scale it up. Yet he believes it is worth trying. “This is a proposal for reasonable policy experiments,” he said.
National supermarket costs are expected Increase 2.2 percent This year, according to the USDA. Price increases will become even more difficult for poor Americans if the Megabill of President Donald Trump passes, including cuts on federal food support programs such as Snap. From such threats to the affordability of food, the mere possibility of change can justify a process of something new. Other major cities also register as guinea pigs: Madison, Wisconsin, is in the process From opening a store for municipal property. Last year Atlanta focused food insecurity among public school students and their families by opening a free supermarket – it functions like one Food Pantry but is filled as a supermarket-financed by a public-private partnership. The impact on health has not yet been investigated, but the question is high. “We do slots for appointments, and they immediately disappeared,” said Chelsea Montgomery, the adviser of Atlanta Public Schools.
Mamdani’s proposal is hardly the first unorthodox policy experiment that New York has considered. The city took a chance of congestion prizes to reduce traffic and to finance public transport, at Universal Pre-K to guarantee access to information in early childhoods and on guided injection sites to curb the overdosis crisis. All have achieved their objectives. Maybe millions of New Yorkers get their biological, gluten -free cheese clouds cheaply on a city market over a decade. Or maybe the entire project will go the way of the city failed attempt to end poverty By offering cash in exchange for efforts to build healthy habits. The point of experiments is to find out.
#York #hungry #great #experiment #supermarkets