Menin on grocery site selection and impact on bodegas

On the affordable groceries plan, to be clear, as I said in my testimony, we completely agree that grocery prices are extremely high and that we have to figure out what we can do about that, which is why

we're very focused on funding food pantries.

We're very focused on funding a number of organizations that are currently doing a lot of work in this space in New York.

As I mentioned, we're focused on banning surveillance pricing, dynamic pricing, so we're getting sort of to the root causes across the city that are causing for rising prices.

We're focused on creating an insurance accountability office to lower insurance costs for small businesses, grocery stores, and others that are, again, paying four to five times the national average on insurance.

So I guess one of the questions I have about the...

The administration's plan is how were these various, the two sites, how were they selected and how many competing businesses, grocery stores, bodegas are in those surrounding areas of the two sites that have been selected?

And what will be the impact on them?

Thank you for that question and we appreciate all that you're doing for the, you know, helping the food affordability.

It is a crisis here in New York City and, you know, the NYC Grocery is just one lever that we're using to reach the same goal, which is making food more affordable.

NYC Groceries is focused on fresh, healthy foods and everyday groceries.

groceries to be affordable.

We're not going to, it's going to be a regular grocery store, but we're not going to discount everything.

So we're focused on fresh, healthy foods and everyday groceries.

How we selected the sites is we prioritized public sites.

That was first and foremost.

And so we did an inventory of all the public sites.

We also wanted to make sure that from the city's measure that it was, did not have enough grocery stores per capita.

There's a specific DCP measure.

And we also wanted to make sure that it was going to be able to be constructed and online fairly quickly.

It wasn't going to take, you know, a decade.

So we were committed to opening all five stores by the end of 2029, with the first one opening by the end of 2027.

So the first site that we announced, which will be opened by 2029, is La Maqueta.

That is a city site.

And if you've been up there, it has a public market there.

It has other sort of, it's like an eight block.

Site which has all different uses and one of it and it's being renovated and reimagined and one of it is an empty lot and that empty lot was going to be a farmers market so there was going to be city dollars are going into that to convert it to a farmers market and

through our discussions we

we realized that this would be a great place for NYC groceries.

So this peninsula site is, and so that's a ground-up construction, so that's very specific, and that's why it's not going to be open until 2029.

The peninsula, as you know, is the former spot for juvenile detention center.

It's a development.

that EDC and the city's been working on for some time.

It's gonna have 740 units of housing.

A lot of it's gonna be family housing.

It's in three phases, and we're pretty much through phase one.

And about to launch phase two, but phase three, contemplated, which is not gonna happen for several years, was gonna have a grocery store.

It was required to have a grocery store.

So there's a real shortage of grocery stores up there.

There's not really any grocery store really close by.

So we decided that we were gonna accelerate that grocery store that was gonna be

online for constructed in phase three and bring it to today and that's and it was also a space that was ready to be tended to fit out into a grocery store sort of like poised for a kind of a

perfect location and structure for a grocery store and so we selected that one as the second site that we announced but it will be the first one open by the end of 2027.