A year and a half ago, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson first floated the idea of opening a city-owned grocery store. Now, city officials say they have scrapped their public grocery store plans in favor of opening a public market.
A year-round public market, city officials said, would sell staple grocery items, such as milk and bread. The market would also contain retail spaces for local farmers and food retailers to sell their products, which the city said it would rent out at low cost.
Still, details are scarce about when such a market would open, how it would be funded and operated and where it would be located.
The announcement of the change in plans comes weeks after the Tribune reported the city did not apply for state funding for a public supermarket despite previously saying it would do so.
“This market will have almost like a multiplier effect in that we could support local entrepreneurs and food producers in our own neighborhoods that will essentially now have a place to sell their goods,” Deputy Mayor Kenya Merritt said in an interview. “This model, I think, came out of a desire to be more impactful than just a public grocery store.”
Johnson’s original proposal for a municipally owned grocery store was a bold one: No major U.S. city had opened a publicly owned supermarket, although the concept had found mixed success in several smaller municipalities and has since attracted interest in other big American cities, including in New York.
Proponents of the concept, including the mayor, said a city-owned store could help address the dearth of supermarkets in some neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides, where big grocery companies have shuttered store after store, leaving many residents with limited access to fresh groceries.
As recently as late August, the city planned to apply for state funding to help pay for a public grocery store in Chicago, after a feasibility study created for the city by private consultants found that such a store was “necessary, feasible and implementable.” The city has not released the study to the public despite previously committing to doing so.
But in January, the Tribune reported city officials had not applied for state funding after filing a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed Chicago had not filed any applications for a grant under the $20 million Illinois Grocery Initiative.
The city could have secured up to $2.4 million for the project if it had applied — nowhere near enough to fund a new supermarket but a place to start.
In an interview last month, the city’s chief operating officer, John Roberson, said the city “really did not have anything to apply that money to in terms of a project, a shovel-ready project that was ready to go.”
The idea for the public market, Merritt said, came out of conversations with the Food Equity Council, a group of food system professionals who advise the city on food access issues.
In addition to the public market, the city plans to develop an “incubator” program that will help provide training and apprenticeship opportunities for hopeful future grocery operators. The city said it also hopes to launch a program that will provide support in the form of funding and training to local food retailers.
Erika Allen, a co-chair of the Food Equity Council, said members of the group are aware of the challenges of the grocery business, which often operates on thin profit margins dependent on highly perishable inventory.
“For a city to sponsor that or run it didn’t make sense to most of us,” said Allen, who is CEO of the Urban Growers Collective, an urban farming nonprofit based in Chicago. But it did make sense, she said, for the city to invest in infrastructure to support food access — like a public market.
“Our goal here is to stabilize food access,” Allen said.
“We’re really looking at food security and food access as a basic human need,” she added.
Merritt said the city could not yet specify where a public market would be located, though she said the city was focused on the South and West sides.
The project could involve one market or multiple spots across different neighborhoods, Merritt said.
Merritt would not specify how much the city expects the market to cost or what specific funding sources the city, which is still projected to face a large budget deficit next year, would tap to bankroll it. Broadly, she said, the city expects to use a combination of city dollars, philanthropy and perhaps corporate partnerships to support the project financially. She said the city could not yet provide a specific timeline for when a market might open.
Merritt said the city is not sure whether it would operate the public market or contract with a third-party operator to manage the day-to-day running of the market.
In a presentation city staff shared with members of the Food Equity Council in November, they referenced public markets in three other cities — the North Market in Columbus, Ohio, Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia and the Milwaukee Public Market.
Successful public markets are typically located in high-density, downtown areas of a city because they need lots of foot traffic to sustain themselves, said Andrew Lamas, a professor of urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
That raises questions, Lamas said, about whether a public market in Chicago will address the issue the city said it wanted to tackle when it floated the idea of a public supermarket: food deserts on the city’s South and West sides.
The Reading Terminal Market, for instance, is located in downtown Philadelphia, near hotels, transportation arteries and a five-minute walk to City Hall. The publicly owned market is managed by a nonprofit that oversees its day-to-day operations, Lamas said. People who shop at the market are diverse, both in terms of race and class, Lamas said, even though many other public spaces in the city, such as public schools and transportation, are more segregated.
“That’s valuable,” Lamas said. “But it doesn’t respond specifically to the food desert issue.”
Merritt emphasized that Chicago plans to open a market in a location where it would address a gap in food access. The market or markets would be located in public transit-accessible areas where there is community support for the project, she said. “We envision these markets to become destinations that drive economic vitality in the community where they are located,” she said.
Lamas agreed that a public market is a more feasible model for the city to tackle than a supermarket. The benefit of a public market, he said, is that the risk inherent in a supermarket operation is spread across many different businesses.
“I think this is a better model,” for the city to attempt, he said. “The problem is that it may not address the interests of low-income people.”
