City-Backed Kansas City Grocery Store Closes Despite Millions in Taxpayer Funding
A city-run grocery store in Kansas City that was propped up by more than $18 million taxpayer dollars has closed.
Sun Fresh Market opened in 2018 in the city-owned Linwood Shopping Center. Part of a Community Improvement District, the shopping center received a multi-million-dollar renovation budget about a decade ago as part of the city’s sprawling revitalization efforts on the east side.But after months of bare shelves, severe crime problems that Kansas City has spent additional money to curb, and what one reporter described as a “rancid odor” connected to improper drain maintenance, Sun Fresh has shut its doors.
“Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, we are no longer, at this time, able to serve the residents of this important community,” a sign on the front door of Sun Fresh said, local NPR affiliate KCUR reported. “It has always been our dream and passion to provide quality products and services in a safe, family environment. At this time, unfortunately, we are unable to do that.”
For years, the city was “happy to be a partner,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said.
“But there’s always a limit to what we will invest as well.”
The failure of Sun Fresh in Kansas City raises doubts about the feasibility of New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to establish a $65 million network of city-funded grocery stores. Mamdani has been unclear whether the stores will be operated by the city, or if nonprofit partners similar to CBKC will run the stores.
Waving off concerns that New York’s food is expensive because of sales tax rates and high cost of labor, not because of grocery stores’ profit margins, which are famously low, Mamdani has lauded his taxpayer-funded plan as “political experimentation.”
“No matter how you think about the idea, I do think there should be room for reasonable policy experimentation in our cities and in our country, where we actually test out our idea,” he said on a podcast in July. “And if they wok, they work. And if they don’t c’est la vie, then the idea was wrong.”
Kansas City will look for potential operators to continue running the store. Sun Fresh was operated by a nonprofit, Community Builders of Kansas, which said in a statement that the organization has worked “tirelessly to provide food and necessary services to the urban community.”
“Community Builders is committed to addressing the food desert that exists within our under-resourced communities,” CBKC said in a statement. “However, for years, Community Builders has been vocal, in the press, with the community, and with the City of Kansas, City, Missouri (the landlord of the KC Sun Fresh Midtown location), of the challenges we face.”
Despite cash subsidies from the city, Sun Fresh has struggled to break even — likely because of the steep costs of maintaining a security presence at the store.
Police frequently field reports of fighting, drug use and public sex near the Sun Fresh, according to the Kansas City Star. Two managers quit last year over “hazardous” working conditions.
The store’s assistant manager Adriana Rentie said at an August meeting with Lucas and Kansas City Police Department Chief Stacey Graves that on one occasion, a Kansas City police officer “declined to intervene with a SunFresh customer accused of theft because the officer was busy responding to another customer wielding a machete,” the Star reported.
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