The city running grocery stores would be a top one. The city already does a less than ideal job at providing various desperately needed services and groceries are a tough business. We need to improve the services already within the scope of what the city does instead of adding to it.
While you're not wrong, you might check into municipal groceries as done in other cities. Food Deserts are a very real thing, and I can't imagine that NYC is the only city to have problems with them.
If cities want to address food deserts, and NYC does already have programs specifically targeted to this, the best way is to help small independents bring fresh food. Sadly I have seen so much good fresh food go to waste in food deserts because people still spend their money on ultra processed food.
The price of letting people with too much money control the narrative (like all that advertising), amongst others, I'm sure.
This was studied in Chicago and abandoned. One reference that Mamdani recently made was a city owned grocery store in KS. (1) It’s hard to compare small town KS to NYC (2) the city took over an existing store temporarily only to turn it over to a private company. www.koamnewsnow.com/city-owned-e...
That happens all too often
Wonder how often it gets dropped because the supermarket companies weigh in against it
In places like small town America it is not major chains that operate these stores. They are mostly mom and pops. Small towns don’t have the resources to keep them going either. A lot of people don’t realize how thin margin groceries are. It’s not a business that can easily be managed.
How interesting. You do realize, of course, that you have been carefully arguing why things can't be different? As if the problems are somehow insurmountable, or that a major city actually working on a solution is somehow a waste of time, or will be abandoned? On whose side are you on?
I just will not fight for something that has been shown to fail over and over and for which there is not a great argument for a city to do when it has failed at providing basic services to date and now somehow is going to be effective at opening grocery stores?
You are talking to someone who will fight like hell for Medicare for All because having universal health coverage makes common sense and is good for both small business and everyday Americans. I can list a dozen policy issues I will fight for and that the majority of Americans would support.
Absolute truth. I feel the same. Don’t forget the crazy people that have been part of the cult, white supremacists and too many evangelicals. They vote and they don’t care. I spoke with immigrant communities, we told them what would happen and they still listened to their pastors and voted red.
As someone surrounded by immigrants it shocked me how many refused to believe that Trumps policies would be run by Stephen Miller. Now here we are.
I do imagine that you are not actually doing this on purpose, but seriously, you're sounding like a centrist with lots of reasons why we _can't_ have change.
Not a centrist at all. But a realist working with prodemocracy and voting groups that have watched the people that don’t vote understands who votes in primaries and who doesn’t. I’m from a swing state which makes it even more difficult.
As someone who has grown up in small town and rural America but now lives in NYC there is a real disconnect in understanding how cultures have diverged over the past decade between big cities and small town America.
Also small town rural person here. Still in rural America but grew up outside Detroit. People here have lost their minds.
The amount of hours I’ve spent in the field talking to people and knocking on doors is crazy and I’ll keep doing it and pushing for change. We can do this but we need to be strategic about it.