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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.

I'm sure the land prices demand a bigger assembly, but in Montreal big box grocer chains are still able to open smaller branches in urban setting with the same prices. Does NYC have examples of this or is land and logistics too expensive? www.lapresse.ca/affaires/ent...

It’s not land prices that require assembly, it’s the fact that US grocers are used to big stores and NYC lots are small. Whole Foods now has a ~10,000-sq. ft. concept. But the US is a much more suburban country than Canada so the small-format concepts are not as advanced. Hopefully they’ll get…