A coalition of 50 immigrant-led business chambers is raising $1 million to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani's $70 million city-run grocery plan, a move its leaders say is the only option left after the mayor refused to meet with them.
The Multicultural Business Coalition's board voted this week to file a lawsuit against New York City, aiming to stop five taxpayer-funded supermarkets that the group says will gut the small grocers and bodegas its members have spent decades building. The stores would sell produce, meat, milk, cheese, and bread at a 30 percent discount compared to market prices, and pay no rent, because they would sit on municipal property.
Frank Garcia, the coalition's chairman, told the New York Post that the mayor has stonewalled the group's attempts to negotiate.
"The mayor doesn't seem to want to sit down with us. He won't be able to bully these lawyers we are going to bring in."
The coalition plans to formally notify Mamdani's office of the coming legal action and file the lawsuit in the coming weeks. Garcia called it a "non-partisan initiative." The MBC, formed earlier this year specifically to fight the grocery policy, represents Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Jewish-owned businesses across New York City.
Radhames Rodriguez, president of the United Bodegas of America, put the math in blunt terms. He told the Washington Examiner:
"Having items that sell for 30% less than our prices, means nobody will go to our stores."
Rodriguez raised particular alarm about the planned East Harlem location at La Marqueta. Five bodegas already sit within a few blocks of the site. Nearly four dozen grocery stores operate within a 35-minute walk. Mamdani's office said the La Marqueta store alone will cost $30 million and take three years to build.
The mayor's broader plan calls for one city-run store in each of the five boroughs by 2029, starting with the Bronx. The stores will not carry hot food, alcohol, cigarettes, or lottery tickets, items that are staples of bodega revenue. But the coalition's concern is not about product overlap. It is about a government-backed competitor that undercuts them on price while paying nothing for its space.
Mamdani has faced pushback before when his ambitions ran into legal and practical limits. This time, the opposition is coming not from political rivals but from the very immigrant communities his office claims to champion.
At a Monday press conference, Mamdani dismissed concerns about competition. He stated:
"We are not looking to compete with bodegas or grocery stores when it comes to their ability to survive."
That assurance is difficult to square with the plan's own details. A store that sells the same staples at a 30 percent discount, built on city land with zero rent, is a competitor by definition, one with structural advantages no private business can match. The city is not offering to level the field. It is tilting it.
The coalition's legal challenge is not yet filed, and the specific cause of action has not been disclosed publicly. But Garcia said the MBC plans to raise $1 million to fund the fight, covering both lobbying and legal costs. Newsmax reported the coalition frames the issue as one of fairness: taxpayer-subsidized stores should not be allowed to drive out the taxpaying businesses already serving these neighborhoods.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has separately mounted a constitutional challenge to Mamdani's grocery plan, citing a 150-year-old provision in the state constitution. The MBC's lawsuit would open a second legal front, this one led by the small-business owners most directly affected.
The MBC's rapid formation tells its own story. The group pulled together 50 chambers of commerce, spanning six ethnic and religious communities, in a matter of months, united by a single policy threat. That kind of coalition does not assemble over a theoretical grievance. These are shop owners who looked at the mayor's plan and saw an existential problem.
Garcia described the effort as non-partisan, and the membership bears that out. The coalition is not a Republican operation or a conservative advocacy group. It is a collection of immigrant entrepreneurs who came to the United States, opened businesses, hired workers, paid rent, paid taxes, and now face a city government that wants to undercut them with their own tax dollars.
Mamdani has shown a pattern of making bold promises and then reversing course when legal reality intervenes. Whether the courts will stop his grocery plan remains to be seen. But the people suing him are not corporate lobbyists or political opponents. They are bodega owners, grocers, and the immigrant small-business community the mayor claims to serve.
The mayor's office has not publicly responded to the announced lawsuit beyond Mamdani's press conference remarks. The MBC said its next step is a formal letter to the mayor's office, followed by the filing itself.
Mamdani has also faced growing institutional resistance on other fronts, from 9/11 families to county executives. The grocery lawsuit adds a new and politically uncomfortable dimension: the people fighting him are the immigrants his progressive coalition was built to represent.
When the government decides it can sell groceries cheaper than the corner store, using the corner store's own tax money to do it, the word for that is not public service. It is unfair competition, and the people who built those stores have every right to fight it.