100-YEAR-OLD IDEA FOR FEEDING AMERICAN CITIES

Posted by The Philadelphia Citizen on August 18, 2026

Every neighborhood should have a grocery store. Not just a corner store or a dollar store, but a place to buy fresh produce, meat and pantry staples at a fair price: the same kind of baseline amenity as a library branch, pharmacy, or transit stop. Governments across the country are stepping up to make that goal a reality. New York City has committed $70 million to open city-backed grocery stores in all five boroughs. Atlanta opened a publicly-backed grocery store downtown last fall and has a second under construction. And the idea is far older than either: for more than a century, American cities have used public assets to bring private grocers into neighborhoods the market had abandoned.

The need is not in dispute. Whole swaths of urban America, disproportionately Black and low-income, live without a supermarket within reach, and the market forces behind that gap have only hardened. The top 20 food retailers’ share of American grocery sales nearly doubled between 1990 and 2019, from 35 percent to 65 percent. Roughly half of all retail stores opened in the United States between 2018 and 2021 were dollar stores, and researchers have found that every three dollar-store openings push out roughly one nearby grocer. A grocery store is a one-to-two-percent margin business. Operators go where volume is guaranteed and real estate is cheap relative to sales. In the neighborhoods that need them most, the arithmetic fails, and the private market is not coming back on its own.

But local governments hold two key levers that can change the arithmetic: real estate and patient capital. Cities own land, buildings, and balance sheets, and they can accept risks and returns that no private grocer can.

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