Dive Brief:
- New York City intends to open its first municipal grocery store in 2027 at a site in the city’s borough of the Bronx, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York City Economic Development Corporation announced Monday.
- The store will occupy 20,000 square feet in The Peninsula, a planned mixed-use project in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx that will also include more than 700 affordable housing units.
- The announcement follows Mamdani’s disclosure in April that the city had settled on a location in Manhattan for another grocery store as part of the mayor’s plan to open one publicly owned supermarket in each of the city’s five boroughs.
Dive Insight:
Mamdani linked the selection of a site in Hunts Point for the city’s first publicly owned supermarket to his campaign pledge to address the high cost of living in the nation’s largest metropolitan area. More than a quarter of residents in Hunts Point live in poverty, and 59% are considered rent-burdened, meaning that they may have trouble affording necessities like food, according to the New York City Department of Health.
The mayor said the South Bronx is emblematic of an “affordability crisis” that he described as a result of the city’s failure in the past to help residents access essentials like food.
“Working families in the Bronx have been forced to pay the price for a city that keeps getting more expensive while government looks the other way. That has to change,” Mamdani said in a statement. “Making sure every New Yorker can buy fresh, affordable groceries in their own neighborhood is a key part of our affordability agenda.”
Mamdani was joined in announcing the store by fellow Democratic politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of the Bronx, including Hunts Point, in Congress. “Access to affordable, fresh food should not be a luxury determined by zip code; it should be a right,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement.
The city has not said when the Manhattan store, destined for a vacant parcel in a municipal market in East Harlem, will open.
New York City also said Monday that it is soliciting suggestions for sites that could accommodate city-owned grocery stores in the boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island. Potential locations for the stores must have more than 10,000 rentable square feet of contiguous retail space “that is directly accessible from a ground floor entrance” and is eligible for occupancy by a grocery retailer.
Potential sites must also support the development of a grocery store by Dec. 31, 2029, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
New York City has set aside $70 million in capital funding for Mamdani’s plan to develop the network of public supermarkets, and the economic development corporation intends to choose one or more third-party grocery operators to run the stores through a competitive procurement process on the city’s behalf.
