Tag Archives: Affordability

A Moral-Based Journalism Means Challenging MAGANOMICS, Not Mayor Mamdani

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“Bodegas of New York, Unite!”: A Washington Post Editorial Badly Misses the Mark

It’s amazing watching non-New Yorkers try to wrap their heads around a city of more than 8 million people.

And many “throwing shade” savvy native New Yorkers can recognize what looks like a false-flag, right-wing-initiated political campaign when we see one—particularly when its ultimate objective appears to be undermining the credibility of New York City’s popular mayor.

It won’t work.

This week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is supposedly anti-bodega. Last week, it was the politically attractive but substantively inadequate bonus proposal for paraprofessionals—workers who, along with New York City public school employees represented by DC 37, need something far more meaningful: a permanent, pensionable increase in their base salaries, substantially improved benefits, and those improvements codified in long-term collective-bargaining agreements.

Meanwhile, the much larger economic story receives far less outrage: the impact of MAGANOMICS on the ability of working- and middle-class Americans to feed their families.

I spent most of my life in New York City—born there, raised there, and having spent much of my professional career there. I also lived in Washington, D.C., a city that has struggled with serious food-access disparities in some neighborhoods. Full disclosure: not in the Ward 4 neighborhood where I lived.

People who actually live in New York understand something that seems to get lost in these national discussions. NYC already has more than 700 city-funded community kitchens and food pantries spread across the five boroughs, in addition to other charitable, religious, nonprofit, site-based and mobile food-distribution efforts.

I guess the newly mobilized “bodega bros” could complain that all of those organizations are also cutting into their profits. Perhaps they should sue the food pantries for giving groceries away to struggling New Yorkers.

Of course, that would not be a particularly good political look.

But it illustrates the absurdity of the argument. The sheer size of New York City’s population means that even hundreds of organizations distributing free food to New Yorkers in need have not somehow destroyed the private grocery marketplace.

And in addition to those emergency food providers, New Yorkers have access to thousands of commercial food-purchasing outlets: nontraditional and convenience grocery retailers such as CVS, 7-Eleven, Duane Reade, Walgreens, and Rite Aid; medium- and large-scale supermarkets; small neighborhood grocery stores; specialty markets, including health-food stores; permanent and pop-up farmers markets; food co-ops; delis; specific cultural-nationalities, and religious related food stores, produce markets; and, of course, the so-called bodegas found throughout the city—sometimes two or three on the same street and certainly within a few blocks of one another in many neighborhoods.

That is why adding three, four, or five government-supported grocery stores to a city of this size is not going to fundamentally transform New York City’s overall grocery marketplace.

The scale simply does not support that argument.

Did The Washington Post send a reporter to New York City to actually walk through these neighborhoods and assess the likely impact of these scattered grocery outlets before reaching its conclusions?

And the word scattered matters.

New York City is not one single walkable neighborhood. Yes, it has extraordinary population density, a relatively compressed geography for its population size, and one of the world’s largest and most extensive public transportation systems. But outsiders can still misunderstand the everyday shopping habits of New Yorkers.

Brooklyn residents generally do not travel to the Bronx to do their routine grocery shopping. Manhattan residents generally do not travel to Queens or Brooklyn for it. Queens residents are not routinely heading to Staten Island—or across the city—to buy tonight’s dinner. Grocery shopping is overwhelmingly local, particularly in a city where, thankfully, the majority of residents do not own cars.

Therefore, any serious analysis of the potential competitive impact of a handful of new publicly supported grocery stores must examine: where each store will be located, what food-shopping options already exist within its realistic customer radius, what prices those existing stores charge, and what unmet community need that particular store is intended to address.

That is the type of investigative analysis I would expect from a major national newspaper.

And this is where the larger journalistic question arises.
Why expend so much editorial energy attacking a mayor for trying something, whether one ultimately agrees with his particular approach or not—to address the high cost of feeding a family, while minimizing the much larger national economic forces making groceries increasingly difficult for working- and middle-class families to afford?

That should be the story.

Stop engaging in a news-media practice that minimizes the impact of MAGANOMICS on working- and middle-class Americans’ ability to feed their families.

For, at least one elected official is attempting to do something tangible about grocery affordability rather than simply recycling the familiar political rhetoric: “We will not tolerate these high POTUS caused food prices!”

Fine, then what are you going to do about them?

Mayor Mamdani has offered an answer. People can debate whether his answer will work. They can challenge its economics, examine its implementation, scrutinize its costs, and demand evidence of its effectiveness.

As an avid, consistent daily news consumer, I believe that is good journalism.

But turning every policy proposal from Mayor Mamdani into another opportunity for reflexive anti-Mamdani commentary—with anti-New York sentiment seemingly serving as a secondary motivation—is something else entirely.

And if The Washington Post is genuinely concerned about government policy, grocery competition, affordability, and access to nutritious food, perhaps its editorial board should devote some of that investigative and editorial energy closer to home.

Go to Ward 8.

Talk with Washingtonians living in communities where obtaining affordable fresh fruits, vegetables, and other nutritious foods remains a challenge. Ask residents what grocery competition looks like from where they live. Ask how far they must travel. Ask what healthy food costs when they get there.

And while you are there, consider this remarkable contrast: a recent District of Columbia government assessment reported that: Ward 8 had only one full-service grocery store, while each of Wards 1 through 6 had at least nine.

Now that is a grocery-access disparity story worthy of serious editorial attention.

And then ask the most important question:

How do we get those Ward 8 families what Mayor Mamdani is trying to provide for New Yorkers struggling with grocery costs: greater access to good, higher-quality food at a reasonable price?
That would be journalism rooted not merely in political “hating” and partisan posturing, but in moral purpose and journalistic ethics.

“Bodegas of New York, Unite!”: A Washington Post Editorial Badly Misses the Mark: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/08/27/minority-owned-bodegas-will-be-hurt-by-mamdani-city-run-groceries/

Winning NYC’s Affordability Fight Is Impossible Without Public School Accountability

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When public schools fail to educate with integrity and accountability, families are priced out of the future.

When a city’s school system fails to deliver high-quality education to its most educationally, politically, and economically disenfranchised students, and does so without intentional, effective integrity or, no possibility of facing the threat of meaningful consequences for failure; the families of those children, and the communities in which they live, pay severe and permanent costs.

Those costs are psychological, financial, and social, paid through diminished opportunity, eroded trust, and the stolen hope public education is meant to make possible for all students: real, meaningful generational leaps in the quality of their lives. Any city will remain unaffordable, generation after generation, for families whose children are denied access to the kind of rigorous, accountable education that breaks cycles of poverty rather than reproduces them, regardless of zip code, socioeconomic status, immigration status, race, or nationality.

No city, state, or nation can sustainably outperform, economically or otherwise, the level of educational quality it is willing to invest in all of the children under its care. I learned this lesson viscerally years ago, sitting in my principal’s conference room, when I posed a blunt question to a visiting international delegation of senior public-education officials: Why travel halfway around the world to visit a 99.9 percent Black and Latino, Title I urban American high school?

The answer, delivered with striking honesty, left no room for ambiguity. I paraphrase, but not the intent: “To fully develop our country, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we must close the quality gap between our rural and urban schools. National strength depends on educating every child to their highest potential.” They had studied our work, referencing the New York Times (“Scores Count,” Sept. 8, 1996), and noted something they found instructive: students who entered our high school with significant academic deficiencies were graduating four years later performing at high academic levels.

That PRC delegation was operating with a clarity of purpose too often missing from American debates about “school improvement,” what they described simply as “seeking truth from facts.” Their thinking echoed the famous words of former Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping: It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice. In other words, results matter. And nations serious about their future do not knowingly leave large segments of their children educationally underdeveloped and then expect long-term economic prosperity, innovation, or social stability to follow.

The history lesson here is unambiguous. Societies that deliberately deny any group of children, by race, gender, geography, or circumstance, access to a rigorous and empowering public education are choosing chronic underdevelopment across every sphere of civic life. Economic vitality weakens. Scientific and medical advancement slows. Cultural and artistic innovation withers. The tremendous human potential necessary for national progress is squandered.

Replacing educational opportunity with missed-opportunity incarceration is neither a sound economic strategy nor a defensible educational one. A prison industry fed by failed public schooling outcomes is a moral failure masquerading as public policy. With courageous civic leadership and sustained determination, public school systems can move beyond models that tolerate mediocrity for some children while reserving excellence for others.

Moral, ethical, intellectual, and technical capacities do not emerge by accident. They are built, child by child, class by class, school by school, through a compassionate but uncompromising commitment to high expectations, instructional excellence, and equal access to opportunity. But accountability must be real. It must be shared, and it must be tied to meaningful consequences, not borne solely by students, parents, and the communities with the least political protection.

Public school systems cannot serve two masters. Schools must be places where children’s learning is the non-negotiable priority, not adult employment agencies protected from the outcomes they produce. At the very least, parents and taxpayers deserve honesty about which path has been chosen. Without that truth, what passes for “reform” is little more than the rationalization of failure.

And as long as a city is willing to accept devastating public education outcomes for its least politically connected and least protected children, that city will remain unaffordable for them, generation after generation, regardless of who occupies City Hall.

Michael A. Johnson is a former NYC public school teacher, award-winning principal, and school district superintendent. A past adjunct professor of science education and the author of two books on school-building leadership, he writes frequently about educational equity, policy, authentic school improvement, and the moral obligations of those entrusted with the lives of children.