Mamdani's Ideas Have Been Tried Before -- and Worked
A few years back, I walked into a city-run grocery store in my hometown. It was the spring of 2014, and I was a journalist covering the run-up to municipal elections in Istanbul, a city of 16 million. What I saw shocked me.
It was a no-name market in one of the city’s low-income districts — not much to look at from the outside. But inside were shelves packed with bread, lentils, cheese, oil and even basic household appliances. Most of the items were cheaper brands sourced from small manufacturers that I had never heard of — companies happy to donate goods to the city stores because they could write them off their taxes. The non-profit stores run by the municipality were only available to households whose low-income status had been verified by the city. Prices were low, and families received pre-loaded monthly loyalty cards that worked exclusively at these municipal markets. The balance wasn’t tied to wages or a bank account — it was direct public support, and it was very popular with residents of the neighborhood.
The city-run market was part of a formula that fueled the rise of conservative populism in Turkey since Tayyip Erdoğan — the country’s current president — first came to power as mayor of Istanbul in 1994. He established a vast, and largely underreported, system of urban subsidies and food aid that organically transformed into grassroots outreach.
It’s the same kind of ecosystem of urban subsidies that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has proposed as part of his effort to make that city more affordable: grocery stores, free buses, controlling rent increases and expanding public services.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/20/mamdani-groceries-politics-turkey-00613292