Mayor Zohran Mamdani, moving forward with a key campaign promise despite the concerns of some business leaders, plans to announce on Monday that New York City’s first city-owned grocery store will open in Hunts Point in the Bronx next year.
The mayor wants to create a 20,000-square-foot store at the Peninsula, an affordable housing development in a neighborhood in the South Bronx with a high poverty rate.
Mr. Mamdani has pledged to create five city-owned stores, one in each borough, with the aim of making groceries more affordable for some shoppers. He previously announced a store at La Marqueta in East Harlem in Manhattan that he wants to open by 2029.
“Making sure every New Yorker can buy fresh, affordable groceries in their own neighborhood is a key part of our affordability agenda,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “We are proud to begin this work in the South Bronx and remain committed to opening a store in every borough before the end of our first term.”
His plan has raised concerns from some small business owners and economists, who worry that city-owned stores could hurt smaller supermarkets and question whether his approach is the best way to reduce grocery prices. Jerry Nunez, a manager at City Fresh Market near the East Harlem site, asked the mayor at a forum last month why he had chosen a neighborhood that already had several stores.
“We were right around the corner,” Mr. Nunez said. “Why so close?”
Mr. Mamdani told him that East Harlem was an area where “many are being priced out of the basic essentials.”
“My vision is not that there isn’t room for multiple grocery stores,” Mr. Mamdani said. “My vision is that there is a grocery store within New Yorkers’ reach where they know that they can afford certain things.”
His administration is still examining locations for grocery stores in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and encouraged property owners to recommend sites to the city online. The site in the Bronx is in a district represented by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive ally who supports the mayor’s grocery store plan.
The City Council would have to approve funding for the stores, including the mayor’s request to spend $70 million in capital dollars to build them. Julie Menin, the Council speaker, has expressed concerns about how the plan would affect bodegas.
The Peninsula is a project by the city’s Economic Development Corporation to redevelop the former Spofford Juvenile Detention Facility, a troubled center that permanently closed in 2011. The campus is expected to include 740 units of affordable housing, space for light manufacturing and community events, and commercial space that will house the grocery store.
A two-bedroom apartment at the development costs about $700 to $2,298 per month, depending on a family’s income.
The mayor’s office said that it had chosen sites for the stores based on “grocery store density, income inadequacy and population density” and that there was only one full-service supermarket, Compare Foods Supermarket, within one-fourth of a mile of the Hunts Point location.
The neighborhood, along the East River, is home to one of the largest food distribution facilities in the world. It became known for urban disinvestment in the 1970s and the fires that raged in the South Bronx. Despite city investments in the decades since, the poverty rate in Hunts Point was 36 percent in 2023 compared with 18 percent citywide, according to the Furman Center.
Maria Torres, the president of the Point Community Development Corporation, a group that works on economic revitalization in the neighborhood, said that neighbors “consistently requested a healthy foods supermarket” as part of the planning for the Peninsula.
“We are incredibly excited and hopeful that this pilot project will deliver that to this community,” she said.
The opposition has been mobilizing to try to stop the stores. Frank Garcia, the chairman of the Multicultural Business Coalition, a nonprofit that opposes city-owned stores, said that he was trying to raise $1 million to highlight the concerns of store owners.
The group is planning to hold a rally at City Hall on May 29, when the City Council is expected to hold a hearing about the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which is overseeing the city-owned stores. Mr. Garcia said he was prepared to file a lawsuit to stop the stores.
“This is a waste of our tax dollars,” he said. “The mayor should sit down with us, and we can give him a real plan to bring down prices.”
Mr. Garcia said he had spoken to Ms. Menin’s office about his concerns. Ms. Menin said in a statement that the City Council was “working to identify responsible solutions to lower costs and address food insecurity.”
“The Council looks forward to receiving further details on the administration’s proposal at the upcoming hearing,” her spokesman said.
Rubén Luna, who owns supermarkets in the Bronx and Manhattan, said he was worried that shoppers would flock to cheaper city-owned stores, leading to job losses at his locations.
“We’re not going to survive,” he said. “There’s no way we can compete.”
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is a public policy correspondent for The Times, covering New York City.
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