There's an article in today's Washington Post about a grocery store in Kansas City.
The city owns it, has spent a fortune keeping it afloat, is really getting tired of doing so and there do seem to be several unintended parallels with the schemes of New York City's potential mayor for very much the same thing.
It would appear we're bumping up against that definition of insanity truism again, but let's review anyway.
Ten years ago, with all the good intentions in the world, Kansas City bought itself a broken-down retail center and spent lavishly to bring the area back to life. That included what sounds like a really nice grocery store for residents.
...Nearly a decade ago, Kansas City spent $17 million to buy and fix up the moribund Linwood Shopping Center on busy Prospect Avenue. KC Sun Fresh opened in 2018 with a salad bar, fresh shrimp on ice and flower bouquets. “We were thrilled,” Taylor recalled.
Pretty snaz, no?
When they first took possession of the property, hopes were high, as they demolished and rebuilt what was referred to as 'a ghetto' but had once been part of a thriving, beautiful neighborhood. Sadly, by that time they didn't have so much as a grocery store left.
Don Maxwell doesn’t mince words when he describes the old shopping center at Linwood and Prospect on Kansas City’s East Side.
“It’s a ghetto,” says Maxwell, who used to own the property and still manages it on behalf of the city. “We’re getting ready to turn it into a gold mine.”
When the city bought the property last year for $950,000 with plans to put in a Sun Fresh Market, there wasn’t a playbook for a city-backed grocery store.
“Direct development business isn’t something the city is used to doing,” City Manager Troy Schulte says. “We had to break some rules and make new rules as we went forward.”
...“Our community certainly deserves a full-service grocery store. We have to do everything we can to make sure these amenities are afforded to all of our citizens,” says Reed.
Opening to gangbuster patronage of some 14,000 shoppers a week in 2016, the city leased the store to not-for-profit Community Builders of Kansas City, who took over operations and management in 2022.
There had already been a significant drop-off in Sun-Fresh customer traffic, mirrored by a rise in area crime. By this year, there were barely 4000 people through the door during any given week.
...The store was first run by a private grocer; Pierson’s nonprofit took over in 2022. Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.
At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight.
This, with a police station only four blocks away.
The non-profit is learning a hard lesson about the 'profit' margins that grocery stores run on - they are tiny and merciless. Kansas City was recently brow-beaten by the community into dumping another $750K into the store to keep it afloat.
...A public safety task force met last week to discuss the future of the Linwood Shopping Center, and how to spend $750,000 in emergency city funding intended to keep a troubled grocery store afloat there.
Meanwhile at the Sun Fresh Market, shelves and freezer aisles sat mostly barren. Store operators say the city’s stopgap funding will go toward stocking those shelves, but there’s still a larger problem — and it’s not management.
...Pierson said the store runs daily deals for customers, even offering essential items like eggs and milk at a cheaper price. But the financial strain remains.
“It's a deep, deep, deep hole,” Pierson said, adding that the store is a long way from breaking even, “even with all this city money.”
Folks who have years of experience in the thankless business don't want to tell dewy-eyed optimists, 'I told you so,' but they will tell them so.
...“Running a grocery store is a difficult business,” said Doug Rauch, a former Trader Joe’s president who founded a chain of low-cost stores in the Boston area that shuttered in May. “You can have religion about the mission, but if you don’t have vast experience and knowledge about how to run these operations, you’re really going to be in trouble.”
Residents, of course, only wish that their supposedly one fresh, affordable food resource for blocks and blocks would remain open. But it's become ever more frustrating to go into the Sun-Fresh and see what looks like miles of empty shelves, or, even more enraging, one lonely tomato in the produce section.
...“This is pathetic,” she said, shaking her head as she pushed her cart down an aisle. “Every neighborhood deserves a good grocery store. This is the nearest store for six neighborhoods, and this is what we’ve got.”
Despite a recent $750k taxpayer subsidy, the shelves at Kansas City's government-run grocery store are "almost bare." It also lost $885k last year and is, unsurprisingly, hemorrhaging customers. pic.twitter.com/DjsuEr7UnJ
— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) July 18, 2025
Yet, it's also 'residents' in the area causing the pain to their neighbors, however politely the WaPo puts it - social issues, you know.
The non-profit pays for additional store security despite the presence of such a close police station, where, according to that division's patrol commander, his officers can't keep up with the neighborhood crime.
...The issues defy quick solutions. The police department’s East Side patrol division is just four blocks away, though police Maj. Chris Young said that even an “overwhelming presence” of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents. Young, the patrol division’s commander, links the rise in crime to fallout from the pandemic, rising inflation and a shortage of police officers following racial injustice protests in 2020.
And this is where one discovers an interesting fact that should be part of any discussion regarding Zohran Mamdani's New York City-owned grocery store plans. Mr Mamdani is as anti-police and incarceration as they come, is he not?
You'll never guess where the problems driving business away from this city-owned store originate.
In 2015, as they wanted to 'get out of the business of running it,' Kansas City closed its jail completely. They have a couple of holding cells, but if they're full, well...they're full.
So unless it's a murder suspect, fuggedaboudit.
...“It's huge because the number one issue that we get when the police are called out is that, ‘Well, we can't arrest because we don't have a jail,’” Emmet Pierson, CEO of Community Builders Kansas City, told KCUR.
“The KCPD does not have a policy that says we do not arrest,” police Chief Stacy Graves told KCUR’s Up To Date. Graves also said the department also makes arrests for disorderly conduct, property crimes and lewd and lascivious behavior. Still, she acknowledges the need for more jail space.
...Pierson recalled an incident on Aug. 13 when a disgruntled customer went to his car and re-entered the Sun Fresh grocery store on Prospect armed with a pistol. The manager spent four minutes on hold with 911. Police arrived just in a nick of time, Pierson said — the gunman was threatening to empty his weapon and said, “There would be crime tape all over the parking lot.”
However, the man wasn’t arrested because police said the few municipal cells KCPD has at Metro Patrol were full and the jail closed at 12:37 that afternoon.
That is Mamdani's dream NYC right there in the flesh, isn't it?
As if it weren't bad enough, when the miscreants do make it downtown, they are almost immediately released, hop on a city bus, and head right back to the hood.
Right back to the Sun-Fresh hangout. There's nothing to stop them.
For Pierson's part, he reported that the store went right back into the red almost immediately after he cashed the check.
...Pierson had bad news, however. He told the group that KC Sun Fresh was again in the red after he used the $750,000 in city aid to pay off outstanding invoices and restock the shelves. So far, according to Patterson Hazley, the city’s finance director said it has spent about $29 million on the shopping center project.
“Everyone says, ‘Why aren’t we doing X, Y and Z at the store?’” said Pierson, who has spearheaded other urban revival projects, including another grocery store and a pickleball complex. “Well, we covered the expenses and went negative-$39,000, and we’re back in the same situation.”
And there was more, Pierson continued. The store’s insurance company had dropped it, and the premiums with a new insurer were 45 percent higher. The audience gasped.
I'll bet the insurance is through the roof.
The city is planning on building a jail, though...sometime.
Then there's another wrinkle that makes this already ridiculous pain and posturing even more puzzling. Besides the population density not being sufficient to support a store of that size, the data WaPo references shows that the lower-income folks in the neighborhood aren't in a food desert by any means. There's now an Aldi as well as one of those funky, little, long-established, independent corner grocers you'd expect to see in a neighborhood like that.
Obviously, Aldi wasn't there when this plan was hatched originally, but research like density support isn't exactly a progressive strong suit when they start pie-in-the-sky dreaming.
Listening to Mamdani spin his NYC fever dreams through interviews, I foresee it all coming full circle yet again, even as Sun Fresh predictably crashes.
