New York City's ethnic grocers are fighting Mayor Zohran Mamdani in court, arguing his push to put a municipally run supermarket in every borough threatens a corner-store trade passed down since the 1960s, from the earliest Puerto Rican bodegueros to the Dominican, Central American and Mexican shopkeepers who run most of the city's bodegas today.
The Multicultural Business Coalition, an alliance of roughly 50 ethnic chambers of commerce, filed two separate lawsuits Monday, Aug. 24, in New York State Supreme Court, seeking to block the mayor's five-borough municipal grocery rollout. The first suit brings class-action civil-rights claims on behalf of smaller, minority-owned grocers who argue they cannot compete against government-subsidized pricing. The second, patterned on earlier legal fights against big-box retailers such as Walmart entering the city, contends the municipal stores exceed what city law allows and that officials skipped the environmental and community review a project this size normally requires, and it asks a judge to pause construction until that review happens.
A Lineage Traced From San Juan to Guadalajara
Coalition leaders have framed the fight as generational. Jairo Guzman, who leads the New York State Mexican Chamber of Commerce, put it this way in a written statement: "The Puerto Ricans were the bodega pioneers," adding that the trade passed to Dominican, Arab, Korean and Chinese owners before reaching the Mexican merchants he now represents. He argued the city should scrap the plan and negotiate with grocers directly instead.
Coalition chairman Frank Garcia traces his own family's stake in the fight back further. He says his grandfather opened one of East Harlem's earliest corner stores during the late 1960s, just as the neighborhood's established grocery chains were pulling out amid disinvestment and fires that scarred the area, and later started an early association to protect immigrant shopkeepers, a legacy Garcia argues Mamdani's plan now threatens. The coalition itself only came together this year: it was formed in May and has grown to represent businesses across Hispanic, Asian, Caribbean, African, Middle Eastern and Jewish communities.
Bodega Owners Say They're Watching a Neighbor Move In
The dispute is most visible in East Harlem, where the city has confirmed its Manhattan store will open inside La Marqueta, the century-old market hall. Elvis Arias, who has run America Deli Mini Market a block away for a quarter-century, worries the discount competitor could push him out. "I'm scared to get out of the business, because I'm here 25 years," he said. Arias says the mayor unveiled the plan just outside his storefront but never came in to ask how it might affect him.
Nearby, Ricardo Rivera, who works at another East Harlem grocer, said a subsidized competitor could cost workers their jobs. "They're going to hurt the business," he told ABC7 New York. Those worries spilled into public view Wednesday, when coalition organizers and neighborhood shopkeepers rallied near the future store site.
The Legal Claims
Mark Jaffe, the coalition's general counsel, argues the math simply does not work for private grocers. He also happens to lead a separate business group, the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, as its president. A city-run store, Jaffe said, "won't have to pay an electric bill" on top of paying no rent and buying nothing at full price. He has separately pointed to roughly 15 grocers and bodegas packed into the surrounding blocks around La Marqueta — a mix that includes several stores owned by Korean and Hispanic families — and asked how any of them could avoid being undercut by a store built practically on their doorstep.
Coalition president Ken Roldan has accused Mamdani of turning city government against the very communities he campaigned on defending, framing the plan as a betrayal of the mayor's promise to champion working-class New Yorkers. Roldan has put the number of small grocers who could take a financial hit — bodegas and supermarkets owned largely by minority families, as high as 1,000.
City Hall's Response
Mamdani has stood firmly behind the plan. Asked about the lawsuits at an unrelated press conference Monday, he said he remained confident the stores were both legal and necessary, pointing to grocery costs that his office says have climbed roughly 30% in recent years, a figure in line with a separate national estimate the city cited in July of a 33% increase since 2019. City Hall has already committed $70 million toward construction and is running a request for proposals to find private operators to manage the stores, with responses due by mid-October.
The city says its discount program, a 30% cut on a defined basket of produce, meat and pantry staples, will apply to every shopper regardless of income and is projected to deliver an estimated $90 in monthly savings, or close to $1,000 over a year. Officials have also stressed what the stores will not sell: cigarettes, alcohol, lottery tickets or hot prepared food, the categories bodega owners say generate much of their daily revenue. Mamdani has pointed to two existing markets as proof similar projects have not hurt nearby bodegas. One is Essex Street Market, down on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The other, Moore Street Market, sits several miles away in Brooklyn's East Williamsburg. Both are leased out to private vendors, at well below typical rent, through contracts with NYCEDC, the city's business-development arm.
Separately, the administration has touted "OPEN for Small Business," its July push to roll back more than 50 rules and permitting requirements for bodegas and other small businesses, including a plan to eliminate the separate permit bodegas currently need just to display fruit or flowers outside their own doors.
Precedents Beyond New York
Mamdani's team has pointed to models elsewhere, including small, government-run grocery stores like the one in St. Paul, Kansas. The most-cited example is Atlanta's Azalea Fresh Market, a downtown grocery store that opened in September 2025 through a public-private partnership among the city, Invest Atlanta and the grocer Savi Provisions. Atlanta officials say it now serves more than 20,000 customers a month, a track record Mamdani's administration has cited as evidence the concept can work, even as critics note no U.S. city has attempted it at New York's scale.
What Comes Next
The Bronx store, part of a residential development called The Peninsula in Hunts Point, is furthest along and is expected to open first, before 2027 is out. The city's own timeline calls for all five stores to be running by the end of Mamdani's first term in 2029, though CNN has separately reported a 2030 target for the remaining locations, a discrepancy that has not been resolved publicly. Sites for Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens are still being narrowed down through an online portal the city set up to collect location suggestions. For now, no court date has been set, leaving both sides to await a ruling on a fight each frames as a test of who gets to define affordability in immigrant New York.
