Mamdani Moves Forward on Government-Run Grocery Store Plan

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Sunday that the city will open its first government-run grocery store in East Harlem. 

The self-avowed democratic socialist mayor aims to fulfill his campaign promise to open one city-run grocery store in every one of the city’s five boroughs by the end of his first term. Mamdani made the announcement on his 100th day in office, saying that the store would be up and running by the end of next year.

“During our campaign, we promised New Yorkers that we would create a network of five city-owned grocery stores, one in each park,” Mamdani said in his statement. “Today, we make good on that promise.”

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Mamdani promised to construct “stores where prices are fair, where workers are treated with dignity, and where New Yorkers can actually afford to shop at our stores.”

The store will be located in La Marqueta, the New York Post reported.

Though Mamdani said the government-run stores were “going to make it easier for New Yorkers to put food on the table” and bring down prices, they have been met with much skepticism.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, wrote on X, “Government-run grocery stores! What could go wrong?”

John Catsimatidis, the owner of Gristedes and D’Agostino’s, “the city’s oldest and largest independent supermarket chains,” wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year that Mamdani’s proposal “would collapse our food supply, kill private industry, and drag us down a path toward the bread lines of the old Soviet Union.”

The initial location has a planned price tag of $30 million, according to The New York Times, nearly half of the $70 million Mamdani requested in his 2026 budget for all five planned store locations.

New York City faces a budget crisis. Comptroller Mark Levine has said that New York is looking at a $7.3 billion budget gap between this year and next year.

“I can tell you that in all that time  I—and we—have never seen a fiscal challenge as big as the one we face now,” Levine said to the New York City Council in March.

Mamdani also admitted Friday that New York City is “worse than broke,” though he has blamed the fiscal shortfall on his predecessor, former Mayor Eric Adams.