COMMENTARY: Mayor Mamdani’s Government Grocery Store Idea Comes to Nebraska

by Dave Mastio

When Omaha Mayor John Ewing breaks into song, don’t expect an aria. You might, however, appreciate the depth of feeling he has for the issue. The food desert in North Omaha is no laughing matter for the people there, though that’s just what some in the audience did as Ewing’s little ditty killed.

“Down the road there’s a grocery store … with dignity for all, that’s our battle cry,” he sang as a small crowd cheered and clapped on a grassy field that may soon host a 25,000-square-foot Christian grocery store and more. Its presence will indeed give some dignity back to neighborhoods where residents have long felt abandoned.

Who knew that the siren song of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for government grocery stores would find Omaha in tune with the city that never sleeps. Even more surprising is the fact that Republicans are paying the fiddler.

Perhaps Ewing was in a singing mood that morning because of the $1.5 million state grant that Republican Governor Jim Pillen’s administration had given the non-profit opening the store in the heart of the city’s black community.

Commenting on similar situations where Trump-supporting politicians had backed a newly muscular government approach once anathema to Republicans, traditional conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson said that “If you support socialism, apparently Donald Trump is your guy.” Pillen, too, it seems, though in an agricultural state like Nebraska, government help is never far.

If in Mamdani’s short time in office he has injected one idea into the national public policy discussion, it is what he calls the “urgent” need for government to get in the grocery business.

“Mamdani has certainly given this sort of thing a level of national visibility that wasn’t there before he ran for New York City mayor,” University of Nebraska at Lincoln Professor Kevin Smith told me in an email, though he thinks the private-public partnership in Omaha is different than what Mamdani proposes.

For Mayor Ewing’s part, he sees the problem as something older than most of the people in North Omaha. “The issue (of a grocery store) is important to the community because it addresses a food dessert that has existed for over 50 years,” he said in a request for comment.

North Omaha is not alone in doing something about old problems. Mr. Mamdani’s impact is literally all over – and it is coming allegro. You can feel the beat.

Last week President Trump’s USDA closed applications for a $20 million round of the Local and Regional Healthy Food Financing Partnerships Program set to back everything from Mamdani-style government grocers to co-ops and government-backed non-profit and private-public commercial setups.

This month, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker announced $26 million through what he dubbed the Illinois Grocery Initiative: $21 million for new stores in food deserts, $4.5 million “Grocery Rescue” to reopen stores closed in the last year, and $750,000 for equipment upgrades.

In Minnesota, Minneapolis set aside $200,000 in the 2026 budget to study a plan for city-owned grocery.

Across the border in Wisconsin, Madison’s long-delayed Maurer’s Urban Market got an opening date of October 5 after years of delay and several million dollars in city support.

In Atlanta, construction is underway for a second location of Azalea Fresh Market after over $8 million in government grants and loans for the first location.

Maybe one reason Mr. Mamdani’s melody seems to have conquered the top 40 is that it isn’t Mr. Mamdani’s tune at all. Most recently, it was Barack Obama’s and even then it was more classic rock than pop. As part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” health campaign, his administration launched a planned $400 million program of public-private partnerships to put government-funded, but not government-run grocery stores all over the country. So far over 1,000 projects were funded, including during both Trump administrations where the program, passed by Congress as part of the 2014 Farm Bill, continues.

The results of that effort are coming in from all over the country where stores are closing in disarray or bungled efforts never open at all. That’s perhaps why, in some unexpected quarters, there’s a note of skepticism appearing even as others rush to jump on Mamdani or Obama’s or whoever’s bandwagon this is.

Out on the left coast they’re starting to sound more conservative than Nebraska. This year Seattle’s Democratic Socialist Mayor Katie Wilson, who did allocate $1.7 million to subsidize independent grocers with security, repairs, technical assistance, and market studies, dropped earlier pinko talk of municipal supermarkets.

In San Francisco, the city council that has never found a left-wing idea it won’t adopt, abandoned an all-too-typical West Coast plan for a new tax on vacant grocery store fronts to fund a city agency to reopen them. Their California counter-cultural idea instead? Deregulate – end the need for conditional use permits for grocery stores and find other red tape and fees to cut.

“The tactics may change. The mission doesn’t,” said San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood. That’s true. Former California Gov.Ronald Reagan turned over in his grave and smiled. Even he hears that tune.

There’s certainly reason to be skeptical of the Mamdani overture. In 2024 when ProPublica published an analysis of data from 18 states where the federal program funded grocery stores under President Biden, they found that nearly half the government-backed stores had already closed or never opened at all. Some didn’t last a year.

The ProPublica people could rock on because the examples keep coming.

Down Interstate 29, not too far from our fair state, in Kansas City, Missouri, the latest fiasco looms. “The shelves at the Blue Parkway Sun Fresh grocery store have barely had food on them for months,” The Kansas City Star reported last week.

“You can’t get two of nothing,” shopper Phyliss Strozier told her local paper.

The store is rumored to be closing soon and is owned by the same non-profit that closed another Sun Fresh in 2025 after receiving nearly $20 million in government funds.

Such stories are common. Only a few weeks ago, seven Save A Lot stores operated by Yellow Banana in Chicago closed after $13.5 million in public subsidies were lavished on six of them. The stores failed just two years into a promised 10-year operating agreement with the city.

That’s surely some information that hopeful North Omaha residents and more government skeptical Nebraskans who are paying the bill would like to know. Unfortunately when KETV, WOWT, the Nebraska Examiner, the Flatwater Free Press and the Omaha Reader covered the news earlier this month, not one reporter was skeptical enough to ask, is this gonna work?

Mayor Ewing said that he believes in the project’s prospects. It combines “public, private, philanthropic approaches with an established nonprofit organization,” he said “The Heart Ministry Center has been extremely successful in creating business opportunities in Omaha.”

Professor Smith, the University of Nebraska professor, says that the impact of Mamdani’s ideas and such grocery stores in Nebraska, “partly depends on how well this project does. If it succeeds it might encourage thinking about similar sorts of projects, if it fails it might encourage cogitation in the opposite direction.”

We’ll see if North Omaha can break the recent curse on such efforts. Anyway, Smith says dryly, all this socialism stuff won’t matter much to Nebraska in the long run. “I’m unaware of anything pointing to this motivating people to have a wholesale rethink about government.”

In bright blue New York, too, Mamdani turns out to be less of a singer-songwriter and more of a cover band. Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was among the first to open government grocery stores before World War II. What about those? Well, some are still selling food to New Yorker’s today. Maybe Republicans make better socialists. At least Democratic Mayor Ewing and North Omaha can hope.

— David Mastio is a Papillion resident and a former National Columnist for The Kansas City Star and Deputy Editorial Page Editor of USA TODAY.