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NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposes five city-run grocery stores. See the arguments for and against, from food deserts to bodega concerns and the $70M cost.
Getty Images, Kwangmoozaa
Government-Owned Grocery Stores: Accessible Nutrition or Government Overreach?
Oct 22, 2026
Issue Introduction
Over the past few years, affordability has become the most central issue affecting Americans and the quality of life in the United States. The prices of groceries and basic necessities have risen 25-30% since the COVID-19 pandemic and are projected to rise another 3.2% in 2026. At the same time, the exodus of grocery chains from rural and low-income areas has scattered food deserts throughout individual states. Recent mass closures include Grocery Outlet’s shuttering of 36 stores and continued shut-downs of many Albertsons locations. These factors have led politicians to make affordability a major campaign issue.
During his progressive campaign for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani raised the idea of opening grocery stores owned and operated by the city government to provide New Yorkers with affordable groceries. In his April 2026 public address that marked his first 100 days in office, Mayor Mamdani announced plans for the first of five city-run grocery stores. Mamdani’s proposed initiative will use $70 million in capital funding to build five city-owned municipal stores–one in each borough–and place them under control of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). NYCEDC will then select third-party operating staff in accordance with city standards for affordability and proper labor practices. Public opinion following the announcement continues to be divided between uproar and support.
The History of Government-Owned and -Assisted Grocery Stores
Several organizations and local governments have established grocery stores as a means of serving their communities. These efforts have had varying degrees of success, providing historical evidence of both benefits and difficulties of running such establishments.
Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative (RGI) is a research and community development program focused on sustaining grocery stores in rural communities. While RGI is not a government program, it uses state resources to support independent and locally-owned stores by providing management training, grant assistance, and other operational resources. RGI has provided assistance to several successful markets, such as St. Paul Market in rural southeastern Kansas. Baldwin Market in Baldwin, Florida was a city-run grocery store opened after the town’s only privately owned grocery store closed. Though it enjoyed initial success, it closed in 2024 because it lost more customers to other towns’ dollar stores and big-box grocers than it could recoup from sales revenue.
Arguments in Opposition: Industry and Political Resistance
Government-run grocery store initiatives face significant opposition from political figures and members of the grocery industry. Both groups’ arguments are based on economic evidence arguing that alternate methods of price easing will be less harmful and more effective in the long run. Owners of New York City’s bodegas and small markets share concerns that the initiative will let government stores undercut their businesses by offering prices that can’t be matched without compromising profitability. This is because their stores operate on tight margins and charge prices which are already lower than those of major grocery retailers. New York City members of the National Supermarket Association also fear that undercutting local markets will threaten the jobs of New Yorkers employed at those establishments. Their doubts are shared by the city council members voting on the funding allocation required to establish the stores.
Mamdani’s use of city-run grocery stores as a key tenet of his political agenda has drawn skepticism from strategists and policymakers who question whether Mamdani and his team understand the initiative’s true financial cost. They observe that the capital required to furnish the stores with proper supply chains and staffing might deter investment in private businesses and grow costlier over time as government administration of these functions makes day-to-day management more inefficient. These challenges lead them to argue that government power would be more effectively invested in subsidies or tax breaks that encourage stores to lower prices. This type of intervention has proven successful through its use in the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which provides subsidies to grocers opening stores in food deserts. Supplementing existing initiatives would allow them to start faster and reach a greater number of city residents.
Arguments in Favor: Lowering Prices and Addressing Food Insecurity
Support for government-run grocery stores hinges on their ability to offer groceries at a lower price than traditional retailers. This is because the government does not have an interest in generating profit, and prices can be set to solely cover operating costs. Such practices are most typically observed in commissaries, government-run stores located on military bases. While only available to military affiliates, commissary stores ease financial strain on military members and families by offering necessities at a lower price. The Defense Commissary Agency (DCA)’s cost-plus model sets prices with a 5% surcharge to cover operating costs and lets shoppers pay 25-30% less at commissaries than they would at retail stores. Proponents of municipal grocery stores use this example to show that such savings can be achieved in civilian settings.
Government-run stores also draw support for their role in addressing food deserts, geographic regions lacking access to grocers and healthy food. More than two dozen New York City neighborhoods are considered food deserts and rely on bodegas as a major food source, providing residents with highly-processed food items as opposed to fresh produce and ingredients. This disparity is reinforced along lines of income. The ratio of bodegas to supermarkets in historically low-income neighborhoods–such as Brooklyn’s Sunset Park and Bedford-Stuyvesant–is 57:1, while high-income neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Upper West Side have a ratio as low as 3:1. City-operated grocery stores could diversify grocery options in low-income neighborhoods with limited supermarket access, offering fresh foods not often available at local stores.
Looking Forward
Mamdani must secure funding from the city council to move forward on developing the grocery stores. The council faces an imminent July 1 deadline to ratify its budget for the 2027 fiscal year, which currently includes the $70 million needed to cover all five store locations. If funding is acquired, development will begin at the two predetermined locations, La Marqueta in Manhattan and The Peninsula in the Bronx, as sites are selected for the stores in Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island. The Peninsula location is expected to be the first to open in 2027.
Conclusion
Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to provide New York City with five government-owned grocery stores is designed to provide healthier, more nutritious options to communities without traditional grocery retailers. While similar initiatives have been carried out in the past to varying degrees of success, providing consumers with lower prices and mitigating the negative effects of food deserts, worries persist about the government’s ability to manage the stores efficiently and the effects said stores might have on small businesses that cannot set competitive prices. The proposal has also drawn questions about whether supplementing existing nutrition programs would be more effective at reaching a greater number of New Yorkers. Debates over this program will likely continue until the July council meeting that decides whether it will receive funding.
Government-Owned Grocery Stores: Accessible Nutrition or Government Overreach? was originally published by The Alliance for Civic Engagement and is republished with permission.
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U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testifies during a Senate Committee on Appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 21, 2026. Hegseth is crafting a strong and masculine identity for his audience as he reportedly contemplates a presidential run.
(Alex Wroblewski/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
Politicians Can’t Just ’Give the People What They Want’
Oct 16, 2026
For reasons that will baffle my many detractors, I am often asked for advice about being an opinion journalist. One of my standard responses is: You have to be willing to disappoint your biggest fans.
What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature. I’ve seen it happen numerous times. Patrick Buchanan was a brilliant columnist and a serious person. But over the course of his career, he listened too much to the people who said, “Go Pat, go!” and too little to friends who said, “I think that’s taking it too far.”
In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear. In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed the advice widely attributed to the French 19th century politician, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people, I must follow them, for I am their leader.” (In fairness, he didn’t say it, critics ascribed it to him.)
But the most dangerous realm for this dynamic isn’t political journalism. It’s politics. Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base. It’s most commonly seen among “conviction” politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s deep populist support was enough to earn him the Democratic nomination three times (1896, 1900 and 1908), but his support wasn’t wide enough to ever win.
Segregationists like George Wallace, socialists like Norman Thomas, and even Buchanan himself offer similar examples of the problem. Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, Kari Lake and Ron Paul provide more recent cautionary tales.
One of the key problems is ego. Politicians see huge crowds or read favorable media coverage and assume their people are the people. In the U.K., socialist Labor politician Jeremy Corbyn was wildly popular among people who liked Jeremy Corbyn. He brought his superfans into the party, but his superfans didn’t represent the broader electorate or even the traditional rank and file who fled the party in droves.
At a campaign event for Lake’s 2022 bid for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat, she asked the crowd, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? All right, get the hell out.” John McCain was one of the most dominant political figures in Arizona, winning six back-to-back Senate elections. Thinking that she didn’t need support from Republicans, or the Democrats and independents who voted for McCain, was a pristine example of mistaking intensity of support for quantity of support.
But I started with journalism to illustrate a point. Jesse Watters, a reliable water-carrier for President Trump, is Fox News’ most popular prime-time host, averaging about 2.7 million viewers per night. That means on any given night, roughly 346 million Americans aren’t watching. But if you’re Trump, you might think Watters is representative of the American people.
Now Watters’ audience does matter, not least because GOP primary voters and small donors are undoubtedly more likely to watch. And because of idiotic “reforms” to our system, many politicians now care more about the primary electorate than the general electorate, because the greatest threat to incumbency is in party primaries. Also, primaries are what matter for the nomination.
The result: Politicians orient themselves to small, intense slices of the electorate. This polarizing dynamic is further intensified by social media. Politicians and activists mistake the “vibes” of X and TikTok for the real world. They become intensely “online” and responsive to the feedback they’re fed by social media algorithms.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently told Jack Posobiec, the exceedingly online conspiracy theorist and right-wing troll, that the Pentagon would livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. I have no issue with Hasan being executed, but a livestreamed execution of a man in a wheelchair is grotesque. Hegseth, who is reportedly contemplating a presidential run, cares about appearing strong and manly to Posobiec and his audience. Posobiec, if you didn’t know, is an open superfan of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, hosting “Franco Fridays” on his podcast.
It seems that Hegseth’s pandering to a tiny sliver of the electorate won’t yield a political snuff film. Even Trump and JD Vance are leery of the idea.
But, who knows, maybe if Watters starts pushing it, they’ll change their minds.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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Congress approval is at a record-low 10%. Moderation and consensus-building, not partisan theatrics, are how Washington gets problems solved.
Richard Sharrocks / Getty Images
Reclaiming the Politics of the Possible
Oct 15, 2026
Washington is stuck in a cycle of performative conflict. The incentives seem to reward outrage, not outcomes that last; purity tests, not problem‑solving. So it’s no surprise that after three shutdowns in less than a year, public approval of Congress collapsed to just 10 percent this spring. (Gallup, April 2026.) But the country we live in — where many middle-income families report persistent financial strain and businesses are navigating unprecedented technological upheaval — cannot be governed by theatrics. Breaking this cycle requires moderation, consensus‑building, and a cooperative approach to governance.
This is not a call for centrism as an ideology. Instead, this is a call for transformative leaders to embrace moderation as their governing strategy, recognizing that in a pluralistic country of nearly 350 million people durable solutions require broad and stable alliances. Ultimately, this is a call for the 240 million of us who are eligible to vote in November to elect consensus-builders instead of bomb-throwers, and healers instead of arsonists.
The Cost of Governing by Extremes
The consequences of zero‑sum politics are no longer abstract. They show up in the daily dysfunction of our federal government.
When Congress is locked in partisan trench warfare, even routine responsibilities become crises. Budgeting devolves into brinkmanship. Oversight becomes a weapon, not a safeguard. And businesses and households face policy whiplash whenever control of Washington changes hands: executive orders are reversed on day one, regulations are rewritten with each new administration, and laws passed on party-line votes are left perpetually exposed to repeal.
This is not sustainable, nor is it what voters want. Nine in ten Americans say compromise is crucial to getting anything done; only fifteen percent think fighting for their values matters more than actually finding a solution. (Walton Family Fdn., Nov. 2023.)
Moderation Is a Method
Moderation is often caricatured as mushy centrism — a bland midpoint between two poles. But in governance, moderation is something else entirely. It is a pragmatic operating system for our politically diverse republic.
Moderation means building coalitions broad enough to survive changes in political power. It means crafting federal programs that states with different political cultures will actually carry out, rather than resist or litigate. It means acknowledging that no party has a monopoly on good ideas, and that the best solutions often emerge from negotiation rather than unilateral action.
Perhaps the most practical argument for compromise is that laws built with support from both parties tend to endure, because the people who helped write them do not spend the next election cycle promising to tear them down. A bill that clears the Senate’s 60-vote threshold almost always carries the fingerprints of the chamber’s minority — and that shared ownership is what protects it when power changes hands. Compare the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in 1990 and has been settled law ever since, with the Affordable Care Act or the 2017 tax cuts: each passed on a party-line vote, and each spent years as partisan fodder.
In poll after poll, Americans prefer practical, incremental, cross‑partisan solutions. (Gallup, March 2026; Morning Consult/Next American Era, July 2026.) We want leaders who can disagree without demonizing one another, and who can legislate without turning every issue into a referendum on national identity.
But there is a catch, and it helps explain why gridlock persists: most voters want the other side to bend more than their own. In one recent Pew Research Center survey, roughly three-quarters of both Democrats and Republicans said it was very important for the opposing party’s leaders to compromise. However, fewer than half said the same about their own party’s leaders. (Pew, Oct. 2025.) Genuine moderation asks something harder: holding one’s own side to the same standard expected of the other.
Consensus-Building Is Not Naïve — It’s Necessary
Congress, by design, requires collaboration. The framers created a system that forces negotiation through federalism, bicameralism, and checks and balances. So when certain lawmakers denounce compromise as weakness, they are actually disparaging one of the overarching objectives of our nation’s Constitution.
The House’s Problem Solvers Caucus is proof the system can still work: several dozen Democrats and Republicans (in equal numbers) are bound by a promise requiring broad support from both parties before the group will endorse any bill. The Problem Solvers played a pivotal role in negotiating and passing the bipartisan infrastructure law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the 2023 debt-ceiling deal.
What to Look for in November
Voters who want consensus-based leadership don’t have to take candidates at their word: they can look at the record. How often has an incumbent cosponsored legislation with members of the other party? Independent scorecards like the Lugar Center’s Bipartisan Index measure exactly that. Does a candidate belong to (or indicate a desire to join) a cross-party working group like the Problem Solvers Caucus? And when asked about a major issue, can a candidate name a single idea from the other side that deserves support or at least consideration? Candidates who cannot answer that question are telling you how they intend to govern.
Voters can also back reforms that would make consensus-based leadership the rule rather than the exception. Independent redistricting commissions, now used in a number of states, reduce the number of seats so safe that an incumbent’s only real threat is a primary challenge. Open or nonpartisan primaries give the broader electorate, not just each party’s most motivated voters, a say in who appears on the general-election ballot. None of these is a cure-all. But each one changes the incentives that today reward outrage over outcomes.
The voters who would be empowered by these reforms are not a fringe. Fully a quarter of Americans say neither party represents their interests well, majorities say both parties are too extreme, and the share viewing both parties unfavorably has nearly quadrupled since 2000. (Pew, Oct. 2025 and May 2026.) More than a third of eligible voters sat out the 2024 election (Pew, June 2025), many of whom feel neither party speaks for them. This “forgotten middle” is arguably the most important constituency in American politics, and certainly the most neglected. Give them something to vote for, not just someone to vote against, and they will show up.
The Politics of the Possible
The challenges ahead — like economic shifts, energy security, climate resilience, Social Security solvency, and our ballooning national debt — cannot be solved by one party alone. They require political leaders who are willing to work across fault lines, resist the gravitational pull of extremes, and restore both houses of Congress to their intended roles as deliberative bodies that thrive on collegiality and efficacy.
If we want a government capable of solving real problems, we must choose leaders who recognize the need for cooperation as a feature – not a bug – in the operating system the founders crafted nearly 250 years ago; who understand that principles actually get translated to policy through coordination, not combat. This is the politics of the possible. The founders built the operating system. Now it’s up to us to run it.
D. James Jones is the Chief Operating Officer of New Statecraft Institute, a DC-based think tank that conducts independent research and analysis of American public policy. He also serves as Senior Advisor to Resonant Public, a public affairs firm. He can be reached at djames@newstatecraft.org.
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Congress ignored 90% of public support for background checks. Learn how citizen assemblies and sortition helped Ireland break gridlock and could work in the US.
SDI Productions/Getty Images
Consensus Without Power: How Sortition Could Break America's Legislative Gridlock
Oct 13, 2026
In April 2013, four months after the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting killed twenty children, the US Senate voted on the Manchin-Toomey Act to expand background checks and to include gun-show and internet sales of firearms. Roughly nine in ten Americans, including a majority of gun owners, supported the bill—a figure that has held steady across more than a decade of polling. It fell short of the 60-vote threshold by six votes. This was not an outlier. On complex issues, representatives often fail to translate public consensus into reality. Research shows that legislators consistently vote in line with donor and interest group preferences over constituent opinion. Before the vote, the National Rifle Association (NRA) warned every senator it would “rate” their vote on its annual rating system, and a low NRA rating could cost senators their next primary. Consequently, the bill died 54-46, and the majority of Americans watched, powerless, as their consensus was overridden by self-interested representatives.
Liberal democracies need a method to bypass electoral incentives that run counter to public opinion. One already exists: Ireland faced the same stalemate on complex issues before it instituted a process called sortition. The beauty of sortition lies in its removal of the primary pressure that misaligns representatives’ interests from public interest: reelection. Much like jury duty, citizens are randomly drawn from the population. An independent body then stratifies the pool, so the final group mirrors the country by age, gender, geography, and income. The group meets over weeks or months, hearing from experts and the public, as well as debating frequently. At the end, it issues a recommendation that parliament may then put to a referendum or pass into law.
In 2016, Ireland gathered ninety-nine citizens to deliberate on an issue so divisive that for 35 years practically every party avoided it: the nation's constitutional ban on abortion. Yet for five weekends starting in November 2016, the group of citizens heard from 25 experts and reviewed 300 of the over 12,000 public submissions they received. In the end, 87% of the group voted to change the ban, and 64% supported full access to abortion within pregnancy term limits. Ireland’s parliament reviewed the recommendation through a joint committee and put the question to a national referendum. On May 25, 2018, Irish voters chose to repeal the ban by 66.4% to 33.6%. An issue that had been stuck in a political impasse for 35 years was resolved in less than two years. The recommendation itself was only advisory; what carried it through was the referendum, which placed the final decision with the public rather than with representatives prone to the same pressures that stall legislation.
Some critics may argue that the only reason this system succeeded in Ireland was that the country is small, homogeneous, and amenable to consensus in ways that the U.S. is not. They might say that American politics is too polarized and divided by party loyalty for sortition to succeed. However, in September 2019, Stanford University’s Center for Deliberative Democracy organized a study called “America in One Room” and assembled 523 Americans at a hotel in Texas. It was the largest representative sample of the U.S. electorate ever brought together for deliberation. Participants came from rural and urban areas, blue and red states. For four days, they discussed healthcare, the economy, foreign policy, the environment, and other fundamental issues. By the end, the proportion who said American democracy was “working well” had doubled. A peer-reviewed study in the American Political Science Review found statistically significant reductions in partisan polarization across nearly every issue. Or consider Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Review, established in 2011, which organizes randomly selected citizen panels to discuss ballot measures before they go to voters. Their findings are published in every Oregon voter’s official voting pamphlet. Independent research confirmed the statements were unbiased, accurate, and helped voters make better-informed decisions.
Sortition could work the same way in the U.S. As in Ireland, a randomly chosen, representative sample of citizens could debate controversial or polarizing topics, such as gun violence, informed by experts, advocates, and affected communities. The assembly would make a recommendation, and then the issue would be put to a binding national referendum, circumventing elected representatives’ conflicts of interest. Granted, a binding national referendum would require a constitutional amendment, as the Constitution vests legislative power in Congress, not the public directly. A next-best option would be to implement a statutory fast-track rule. This would bypass congressional committees entirely and send the assembly’s recommendation to the full Senate or House for an immediate, unamendable yes-or-no vote. This would require a change to Senate or House procedural rules, but each chamber could adopt it by a simple majority vote. Other mechanisms exist, but any process that returns the decision to elected representatives reintroduces the same conflict of interest that killed the Manchin-Toomey Act in the first place.
However, the sortition model is only as strong as a government’s commitment to it. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron formed the Citizens’ Convention for Climate amid the “Yellow Vest” protests. The assembly randomly selected 150 citizens to draft policies to reduce France’s carbon emissions. Macron promised to pass on the assembly’s recommendations to parliament or a public referendum “without filter.” However, when the final proposals were submitted, only 10% were passed on unchanged, with the other 90% either modified or rejected entirely, largely due to pressure from fossil fuel and agricultural lobbies. Without a legally binding authority, citizen assemblies risk being ineffectual.
Of course, there are other structural reforms that would give the public a stronger voice and blunt the influence of outside interests. For instance, establishing independent redistricting commissions to limit the effects of gerrymandering, as well as campaign finance reform to curb outside money and lobbying pressure that pulls representatives away from their constituents. The challenge with these kinds of changes is that they generally require winning over the same conflicted representatives whose self-interests and reelection priorities have blocked consensus for decades. While sortition isn’t a silver bullet, it has one critical advantage: it is one of the few tools that circumvent these misaligned incentives. Crucially, sortition also cuts both ways: a representative assembly might recommend looser gun restrictions rather than tighter ones, and the model only works if the outcome is honored just as faithfully. Sortition’s legitimacy comes from the integrity of the process, not from a particular result.
The memories of the children killed at Sandy Hook in December 2012 were betrayed by the Senate four months later. It took another school shooting, in Uvalde, Texas, to produce the first major federal gun legislation in decades. Yet, it arguably still isn't enough. It provided changes to background checks and red-flag grants, but only for states that want them. Ireland spent 35 years deadlocked on abortion, then resolved it in under two years through sortition. Instead of electing “better politicians,” they temporarily removed them from the equation. The U.S. doesn’t lack public consensus on gun violence; it has a shortage of mechanisms to translate public consensus into law. Sortition is one such mechanism—arguably the most direct path to bypass the conflicts of interest that have made progress on critical issues impossible.
Jack Shapiro is a high school senior from Chappaqua, New York. For more of his writing, follow his Substack, The Amateur Analyst, on economics and current events.
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