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Drives me nuts hearing about "food deserts" in this NYC-owned grocery store discourse. NYC does not have food deserts. It has expensive, low-quality groceries. The first city-owned store (La Marqueta) is in the middle; every red pin in a full-service grocery store. Not a bodega, not a greengrocer.

They're local chains/grocers' co-ops. They have high prices and low quality, and that's what Mamdani is trying to fix. National chains offer better deals, and will enter low-income NYC neighborhoods (East Harlem has Aldi and Costco; Whole Foods is nearby in Central Harlem!) – but we don't let them.

The exact barriers vary, but in the case of this immediate area, it's general NIMBYism. National chains want 20,000 to 60,000 sq. ft. of retail space in one building (no, they don't demand parking in Manhattan), and we don't allow enough development to get many of those spaces. In East Harlem, ...

...allowed densities are generally too low to spur redevelopment, and even when they're high enough, we impose so many inclusionary requirements and demolition controls on the older rent-stabilized housing stock that you can't assemble enough small lots to build something national chain-sized.

Here's a good example of a site that would easily accommodate a national chain. On a corner, a few low-rise commercial and residential buildings that could be assembled near a very prominent corner (E. 116th & 3rd Ave.) with lots of foot traffic and buses. Near a huge, high-density public...

...that are zoned for high-density mixed-use (good), but with a Mandatory Inclusionary Housing overlay (bad) that has proven almost impossible for any market-rate developer to use. So you need to get subsidy from the city to build there. The price you can pay the existing owners is a lot lower...

...(since the city has "value captured" the land for affordable housing), making redevelopment unappealing. Even if you make it work, those deals attract affordable developers who aren't as good at mixed-use as market-rate developers (notice a lot of affordable blogs have crappy/no retail).