Kansas City’s Government-Run Grocery and Transit Failures Explained

Kansas City’s failures are receiving national attention after Zohran Mamdani, the progressive candidate for mayor of New York City, proposed replacing private grocery stores with government stores. The problem is it’s been tried before…in Kansas City. Missouri Rep. Mark Alford warned voters that this approach already has been tried – and failed locally.

Alford reported on the attempt by the city to run a local Sun Fresh store on Linwood Avenue when he was a local news anchor in 2018.

“This was in a food desert, the urban core,” he told Fox News. “There’s a lack of grocery stores in the urban core, but the problem is it’s also an oasis of crime. That’s why no grocery store wanted to move in. So the city subsidized it. They ended up losing $15 million of taxpayer money over this. The crime only increased in that area. There were shootings and robberies, and now it’s a failure.”

How much has Kansas City lost at the grocery store?

“KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week,” the Washington Post reports. “That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.”

Something similar happened with the city’s bus system, he said. The Kansas City Council approved a zero-bus fare system before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 but voted earlier this year to reinstate fares amid staggering financial losses. The Mid-America Regional Council, in conjunction with other entities, found that the zero-fare model resulted in approximately $8 million to $10 million in fare revenue losses across the region in 2020. That loss was supplemented by the CARES Act at the time.

“While some costs related to fare collection were reduced or eliminated, they did not fully offset revenue losses or additional costs due to increased service demand,” the findings read in part. “For the zero-fare program to be sustainable, either additional revenues or new cost savings must be found.”

Alford encourages other cities to learn from Kansas City’s costly lessons.

“Socialism does not work in America,” he said. “Communism doesn’t work in America…The same system that failed in Kansas City will fail in New York.”

–Alan Goforth