The City Put Seventy Million Dollars Behind Five Grocery Stores And Opened None Yet

In April 2026, the city turned food into a budget line. Seventy million dollars in capital funding for five city-owned grocery stores, one in each borough, aimed at a plain problem: groceries in New York cost roughly 66 percent more than they did a decade ago, outpacing the rest of the country. The pitch is that public ownership can strip out the costs that normally get passed to shoppers and hold prices down on staples. It is one of the largest single bets the city has made on running its own food access in a generation. As of the summer of 2026, not one of the five stores is open.