In the Media
CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS: An affordability message is the path to Illinois voters’ hearts — and ballots
07. 08. 2025
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When did a carton of eggs become a luxury item? Why am I paying more than 40% of my income on rent? What is this new increase on my electric bill? Why is everything so damn expensive?
We know the problem. The prices of food, health care, housing, childcare and transportation are just too high. From urban centers to rural towns, from seniors to those just out of school, across racial and ethnic backgrounds, party lines and state lines, we feel this struggle. Life isn’t affordable for any of us.
Turns out the pain points of affordability aren’t specific to Illinois. New Yorkers took a bet on Zohran Mamdani as their Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. The 33-year-old New York State assemblyman, little known at the outset of the race, ran and won on a campaign defined by a relentless focus on affordability and delivering real solutions across housing, food and health care for New Yorkers.
The Mamdani campaign was tunnel-visioned on efforts to reach voters — particularly young and working-class voters — who are struggling under the weight of the affordability crisis. Everything the campaign pushed came back to affordability. The ideas were new, simple and easily understood, and they spoke directly to improving people’s lives by bringing down the costs of essentials like food, transportation and housing. His winning message was abundantly clear: Everything is too expensive, and the government must take direct action to help people afford to live.
A central proposal in Mamdani’s campaign was the establishment of cityowned grocery stores. A public option for grocers is a policy intervention my organization has been exploring in Illinois for years. The idea here is simple: The government invests directly and owns — in part or in full — a store in a neighborhood where the market has failed to provide access to affordable food for families. It builds on our country’s long history of deploying public options, from the U.S. Postal Service to libraries to K-12 education, that provide access to essential goods and services and introduce competition where the market has failed communities.
Of course, the usual suspects are quick to speak out in opposition; we saw a fair amount of decrying Mamdani’s city-owned grocery proposal as socialism. The truth is, the government steps into the private grocery market frequently, just not in a way that often works. Right here in Chicago, the city promised $23.5 million in taxpayer funding to Whole Foods to open a grocery store in the food desert of Englewood. That lasted six years, until Amazon bought Whole Foods and closed the store.
Our leaders have spent decades offering tax breaks and subsidies to massive grocery chains, hoping they might return to neighborhoods they left behind, to no avail. The grocery business is notoriously tough, with slim profit margins. Tax breaks and subsidies for private operators aren’t enough to keep stores profitable, so these same massive chains have pursued their own profit by buying up and merging the entire industry.
For example, Kroger owns Mariano’s and attempted to merge with Albertson’s, the parent company of local competitor Jewel-Osco. As the market consolidates, small businesses and operators can’t compete and stores shutter. The result has been expanding food deserts, less competition to drive down prices of goods and, ultimately, no access to healthy food for entire communities.
A public-option grocery store is different from a tax incentive for a private operator to build in a neighborhood. Where the private market might see a neighborhood as unprofitable, like Whole Foods did in Englewood, a city leader can see it as a community where people live and deserve access to affordable food. Instead of handing over taxpayer funds to coax corporations into temporarily doing the right thing, a public grocery store is a commitment to stay and serve. When combined with the enforcement of existing antitrust laws, public grocery stores can sit alongside small businesses in a thriving, fair marketplace.
Earlier this month, by winning in New York, Mamdani became the first major candidate to campaign on public-option grocery stores. He made a bet that his neighbors would see the power of this policy intervention. But Mamdani’s not the first elected leader to try it.
Here in Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker has made a similar bet. We worked with the state to launch a $20 million grocery initiative to support, in part, public ownership and community-driven food access. Recently the town of Venice, near St. Louis, announced plans to open Illinois’ first municipally owned grocery store under this initiative. I attended this announcement and the energy I felt in that room has stuck with me. The people of Venice felt like their elected leaders cared about them, were listening to their needs and were taking a bet on their ability to meet them. I imagine it’s what New Yorkers who turned out for Mamdani felt, too.
Whether it’s Pritzker in his campaign for a third term or leaders in rural corners of the state, the strategy is clear: Illinois leaders must double down on offering affordability and real solutions to cut costs for people and communities with the same relentlessness as Mamdani did in New York.
And it’s more than just the grocery market that needs fixing. Investments in our public infrastructure and people will stabilize our economy, attract businesses to our state and create more good jobs, making things more affordable for all of us.
Illinois policymakers have a real opportunity to demonstrate that they care and understand what we are going through, but that will require courageous and creative leadership that raises the revenue needed to address the crisis we are all experiencing now and for years to come. If they can do that, Illinois voters will continue to bet on them.