Frank Garcia has spent decades building a coalition of 50 chambers of commerce representing immigrant-owned small businesses across New York City. Last week, his Multicultural Business Coalition voted unanimously to do something that would have been unthinkable five years ago — sue a progressive Democratic mayor.
Their crime? Owning bodegas.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to build five city-run supermarkets on municipal property — rent-free — stocked with products priced 30 percent below what private stores can charge. The first location is planned for La Marqueta in East Harlem, where four dozen grocery stores and at least five bodegas already operate within a 35-minute walking radius.
The price tag for that single store: $30 million. Total project cost across all five boroughs: $70 million in taxpayer money, with a target of one store per borough by 2029.
The stores would sell produce, meat, milk, cheese, and bread — the staples that keep a bodega alive. They'd skip hot food, alcohol, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. In other words, they'd cherry-pick the profitable grocery items while leaving the low-margin stuff to the corner shops.
Radhames Rodriguez, president of United Bodegas of America, put it plainly. "Having items that sell for 30% less than our prices, means nobody will go to our stores." That's not a political argument. That's arithmetic.
Garcia said his coalition has tried to engage the mayor's office. "The mayor doesn't seem to want to sit down with us," he said. The coalition is now raising $1 million to fund a legal challenge, and Garcia made clear the administration "won't be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in."
Mamdani's response has been the standard progressive deflection. "We are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive," the mayor said. Which is a fascinating thing to say about a government-subsidized operation paying zero rent and undercutting private prices by nearly a third. That's not competition. That's annexation.
The construction timeline for the first store alone is three years. So taxpayers will spend $30 million and wait until roughly 2029 to find out whether a government-run grocery store can do what immigrant entrepreneurs have been doing since before Mamdani held office — feed a neighborhood.
There's a specific irony the mayor's office has not addressed. The Multicultural Business Coalition represents immigrant-owned businesses. These are the exact communities progressives build entire campaigns around defending. The bodega owner from the Dominican Republic, the Korean grocer, the Yemeni deli operator — they're supposed to be the protected class. Now they're hiring lawyers because the guy who ran on protecting them is building a taxpayer-funded competitor on city land with no rent and a 30 percent price advantage.
Progressive economic theory says government intervention helps the little guy. The little guys just formed a 50-chamber coalition and filed suit saying it'll destroy them.
When the people you claim to protect are suing you for protection from you, the platform has a credibility problem that no amount of subsidized cheese can fix.
