A century ago, Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” were ridiculed for focusing on pipes, drains, and parks. These were small-bore projects, detractors claimed, and unworthy of political struggle. But mayors Emil Seidel and Frank Zeidler knew better: survival and dignity begin with the basics. They understood that public ownership of water systems, sanitation, parks, and essential infrastructure was the only way to ensure these things existed for everyone, not just those who could pay.
“Some Eastern smarties called ours a ‘Sewer Socialism,’” Seidel reflected decades later. “Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ houses; but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers. We wanted our workers to have pure air; we wanted them to have sunshine; we wanted planned homes; we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness.”
Seidel concluded that there was “but one way to get all of that — go after it and get it.”
Today New York City mayoral candidate and frontrunner Zohran Mamdani is receiving similarly dismissive responses to his proposal to build five municipal grocery stores, one in each borough. Like the sewer socialists before him, Mamdani is responding to an inequity that may strike some as banal but is actually fundamental to working-class people’s quality of life. An estimated three million New York City residents live in so-called food deserts without access to real grocery stores. Even where stores do exist, rising grocery prices often put nutritious options out of reach. Mamdani is simply proposing that the government step in and do what the private market has failed to accomplish: sell food to New Yorkers.
Grocery aisles are today what sewers were in the early twentieth century: a major component of daily life run in an unfathomably dysfunctional manner. And just as the project of expanding and improving public sewers was derided until they became indispensable, municipal groceries will seem obvious once they are built and the difference they make can be felt.
Between 2020 and 2024, grocery prices rose nearly 24 percent, outpacing both wages and overall inflation. Even with inflation slowing to just over 1 percent in 2024, grocery store sticker shock remains. For the wealthy, food takes up less than 5 percent of disposable income. But a box of Cheerios costs the same no matter how much money you make, and for low-income families, that share easily creeps up to 30 percent.
Because our food system is designed around corporate profit rather than public need, and because we lack the political imagination to envision otherwise, we tend to take this state of affairs for granted. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t outrageous.
The US grocery market is a picture of consolidation dominated by Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, and Costco. These corporations don’t care about food access in a given neighborhood; they care about quarterly earnings. When profits dip, they shutter stores, leaving behind food deserts and economic sinkholes. When critics notice this problem, they tend to chalk it up to “market failure.” In reality, it’s the market working as designed to extract wealth at any cost.
The grocery industry is shaped like an hourglass, with high-end specialty stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s for affluent shoppers and dollar stores and discount warehouses for everyone else. The mid-tier supermarket, the one-stop shop that once anchored working-class neighborhoods, has stopped expanding, its growth hampered by decades of inequality and predatory corporate strategies. As John Marshall of the United Food and Commercial Workers observes, this hourglass structure mirrors the class polarization of American society: a luxurious top for those with disposable income, and a bottom designed to offer as little as possible to the masses who lack it.
Meanwhile, grocery workers, the people who keep the entire operation running, are being flexibilized and disempowered. Union density in the grocery sector has dropped from over a third in the early 1980s to barely over 10 percent today. Chains cut hours, chip away at benefits, and keep wages low, while simultaneously pouring billions into stock buybacks. Workers stocking shelves often can’t afford to fill their own carts. The grocery sector, like so many others, is a microcosm of corporate capitalism: those who produce the most value are paid the least, while wealth is siphoned upward.
If this is what “the market” results in, abandoned neighborhoods and shuttered stores, the logical response is not to plead for more corporate investment but to recover the ambition to pursue alternatives ourselves. Across the country, communities are turning to what some call solidarity economies: locally rooted, democratic systems of connected cooperatives, community land trusts, and municipal services that prioritize care over extraction. These forms of economic activity are not utopian experiments. They’re practical necessities that allow people who live in places capitalist markets have abandoned to sustain quality, dignified lives.
Municipal groceries are a natural extension of this work. Like public libraries or transit, they are collective goods: universal, local, and accountable to the communities they serve. Their purpose is not to deliver quarterly returns to profit-motivated shareholders. Their purpose is to deliver food, jobs, and stability to communities. The same logic of public ownership that built Milwaukee’s sewers can close today’s food deserts.
Communities like Leon, Kansas, have already proven this. When Leon lost its only grocery store in 2011, residents faced a twenty-mile drive for food. Instead of waiting for another chain, the community, led by its school district, converted the old store into Bluestem Mercantile. Students run it as part of their classes, and the store now thrives as both a grocery and a hub for local producers.
St Paul, Kansas, followed a similar path, pooling resources to open a municipally supported store that continues to meet local needs. These rural operations set a quiet but mighty example challenging the abandonment practices of chains like Albertson’s and the predatory capture practices of replacements like Dollar General.
Illinois has now taken this approach statewide. Its Grocery Initiative has invested over $10 million to open or sustain stores in underserved areas, recognizing food access as a public responsibility.
A Chicago municipal feasibility study revealed that the cost to launch a city-owned grocery store is comparable to the subsidies the city already hands out to private retailers — subsidies that do little to nothing to prevent closures. In Chicago alone, more than forty major supermarkets have closed since 2020, most in black and Latino neighborhoods. Public stores, by contrast, can use city-owned land, pooled purchasing, and mission-driven operations to become self-sustaining, all while paying fair wages and reinvesting profits locally.
For too long, cities have funneled billions into private retailers, developers, and flashy projects like stadiums, hoping that trickle-down investment would deliver public good. It hasn’t. Chicago spent millions trying to keep private grocery chains on the South Side, only to watch them leave when profits fell. Imagine if that money had built city-owned stores, employing union labor, sourcing from local farms, and serving the neighborhood permanently.
A grocery store is more than a place to buy bread and milk. It’s an economic anchor. When a store closes, the damage radiates outward: fewer customers for nearby shops, lost jobs, declining property values, and weakened markets for local farmers. When one opens, especially one rooted in public or cooperative ownership, it breathes life back into the community.
Every $100 spent at a local store generates about $45 of additional economic activity in the community, compared to just $14 when spent at a national chain. Municipal groceries can magnify this effect, becoming not just sources of food but engines of local wealth and stability.
Mamdani’s proposal for municipally owned grocery stores in New York is not a dreamy departure from reality. It is a revival of the pragmatic socialism that built modern cities. Mamdani’s vision is no different: food should be treated like water, transit, or libraries, essential infrastructure that belongs to the people. Seidel and Zeidler were mocked for focusing on sewers, but their work transformed urban life in Milwaukee and created a model that cities across the country would emulate.
The growing interest in municipal grocery stores is helping reopen our fiscal imagination. The “pluralist commonwealth,” as Gar Alperovitz has called it, is a vision of an interdependent landscape of public and cooperative enterprises that gradually displace the structural influence of extractive corporate power over cities. David Imbroscio has similarly urged cities to stop falling into the trap of chasing outside capital and to instead pursue “local economic alternative development strategies (LEADS)” to build community wealth from the ground up within cities.
Municipal groceries are precisely the kind of institution that both thinkers call for — practical, catalytic, and transformative. In their best form, they can embody the principles of a solidarity economy: democratic control, local accountability, and a refusal to let capitalist markets make decisions about our collective lives and reduce people to their pocketbooks.
The sewer socialists of Milwaukee didn’t wait for private markets to fill in the gaps of the dysfunctional sanitation system. They built a functional alternative on their own. City officials across the country are confronted by a comparable choice today: continue begging corporations to feed us in persistent fear of abandonment or build the infrastructure ourselves.
Imagine a grocery store owned by the city, stocked with produce from nearby farms, where EBT is accepted without stigma and workers earn living wages. Imagine a network of such stores that never closes because its mission is permanent: to feed and sustain its community.
Public systems work so well that we often forget they are public. No one asks who owns the water pipes or the library; we simply expect them to exist. Municipal groceries can become that kind of ordinary miracle, so effective that the ideological debate fades, leaving only the fact that everyone eats.
As Mamdani put it, “We can be free and fed.”
Great Job Alex Birnel & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
