Blakeman: I’ll use NY Constitution to block Mamdani’s Soviet-style supermarket plan

Bruce Blakeman digging up a clause in the state Constitution to stop New York City from opening its own grocery stores tells you something about where this whole experiment has landed. We're not talking about a subsidy program or a tax credit for bodegas struggling with rent. We're talking about the city government itself becoming a grocer, spending $70 million to stock shelves and run checkout lines in competition with the delis, supermarkets and family-run markets that already exist in every borough.

The "Soviet-style" label gets thrown around a lot, sometimes lazily, but here it actually fits the mechanics of the thing. A city-owned store doesn't have to turn a profit. It doesn't have to worry about rent increases or a bad lease or a robbery spike driving up insurance. It just gets refilled with taxpayer money whether or not anyone shops there. That's not a business. That's a subsidized competitor with a bottomless budget, parked right next to small businesses that do have to make payroll and do have to close if the numbers don't work.

What's notable is that Blakeman isn't just complaining on cable news. He's reaching for an actual legal mechanism, a state constitutional provision most New Yorkers have never heard of, to argue the city doesn't have the authority to do this in the first place. Whether that clause holds up in court is a separate question from whether the plan is a good idea. But it's worth asking why a mayor would rather open a city-run supermarket chain than fix the permitting, tax and crime problems that make it hard for private grocers to survive in the city to begin with.

If Mamdani wants cheaper groceries for working families, there are boring, unglamorous ways to get there: cut red tape, lower costs, make it easier to open and run a store. Building a government-owned retail chain instead isn't innovation. It's a workaround for a city that's made it too hard to do business the normal way.