A coalition of immigrant grocery and bodega owners sued Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over his plan to open five government-owned supermarkets, arguing the taxpayer-funded stores would do to minority-owned food retailers what New York politicians spent decades warning Walmart would do.
The Multicultural Business Coalition, an umbrella group of 50 chambers of commerce representing ethnically diverse business owners, filed two cases in state court. One is a seven-page class action brought on behalf of what it describes as hundreds of store owners from groups that have historically faced discrimination, alleging the municipal stores would violate their civil rights.
The second, a 13-page petition in state Supreme Court, leans on a comparison New Yorkers will recognize: Walmart, which tried repeatedly to open in the five boroughs and was beaten back each time by politicians and unions warning it would wipe out small businesses.
The city stores have pledged to sell food roughly 30% below market rates — a discount the filing says rivals or exceeds Walmart’s. The suit argues the plan amounts to letting a deep-discount operator into the city under the banner of affordability, at the direct expense of minority-owned and small businesses.
“A direct assault on minority business”
The petition also accuses City Hall of skipping a proper review before announcing the sites in July, including any land-use study of how the stores would affect existing groceries nearby, and asks the court to force the city to conduct an economic analysis.
“Make no mistake about this plan,” said Ken Roldan, the coalition’s president. “It is a direct assault on minority business by a mayor who claims to be a champion of disenfranchised poor and working-class New Yorkers.”
The group’s chairman, Frank Garcia, invoked his grandfather, who opened one of East Harlem’s early bodegas in the late 1960s as larger chains abandoned the neighborhood, and founded an association to defend immigrant store owners. What the mayor is doing, Garcia said, disgraces that memory.
Jairo Guzman, who leads the New York State Mexican Chamber of Commerce, called food retail “New York City’s great mosaic,” built by successive waves of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Arab, Korean, Chinese and Mexican owners, and urged the mayor to withdraw the plan and work with the industry instead.
The $70 million plan
The five stores are projected to cost taxpayers $70 million to build. City Hall says the 30% markdown on staples like produce, meat, milk, cheese and bread will save shoppers an average of $90 a month, or about $1,000 a year.
The first two locations announced are La Marqueta in East Harlem and the former Spofford juvenile detention site at Hunts Point in the Bronx. Locations for Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island have not been disclosed.
The suits do not yet name individual plaintiffs; Roldan said the first will be identified at a press conference this week and added to the filings. He also said some owners fear the administration will retaliate through permit and license inspections — and that the coalition will publicize any such cases.
Reporting in this story is based on the court filings and on coverage by the New York Post, which first reported the lawsuits. The photographs are stock file images, not photographs of the businesses involved.
