https://www.kshb.com/news/local-news/in-depth-millions-invested-in-linwood-shopping-center-why-is-sun-fresh-market-failinghttps://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/07/18/city-owned-grocery-stores-crime-funding/In the past 7 years, activists in Kansas City have propped up a city-funded grocery store to serve a "food desert" after almost all major grocers shut down in the area due to high crime and urban blight. The store has been funneled tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to try to keep it afloat, with a special 1% sales tax imposed on the wider and more successful swathe of the city. And just a couple months ago rowdy activists invaded and disrupted a city council meeting to force them to release another $750k in funding to the store. Unlike Mamdani's socialist ideas to build in rich liberal areas already well served by existing options, this store tried to tackle the difficult question of whether socialism can replace private business in a broken urban environment where business isn't viable. And the answer is, no.
Locals report rancid odors and spoiled meat on the few shelves that have anything, with the vast majority of the market being completely empty.
Even with visible police patrols specifically assigned to the area to protect the model store, its still a hotspot of drug dealing, theft and vagrancy both outside the store and even in it.
There's already been at least one murder in the store only a few years after it opened;
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Video surveillance that captured the scene shows the victim entering a store. A black Ford Fiesta arrived, and as the victim left the store, Nichols got out of the car. He stared at the victim until they passed, then pulled a gun with an extended magazine from his side and shot the victim.
Nichols continued to shoot at the victim, even after the victim fell between two cars. Nichols then got back in the Ford and let the scene.
Crime stats show assaults, robberies and shopliftings in the area have skyrocketed in the 7 years since it opened, with a +200% rise;
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At a community meeting last year, Pierson played videos of security incidents so graphic he gave a warning in advance — a naked woman parading through the store throwing bags of chips to the ground, another person urinating in the vestibule and a couple fornicating on the lawn of the library in broad daylight.
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The issues defy quick solutions. The police department’s East Side patrol division is just four blocks away, though police Maj. Chris Young said that even an “overwhelming presence” of officers in recent months didn’t significantly decrease incidents. Young, the patrol division’s commander, links the rise in crime to fallout from the pandemic, rising inflation and a shortage of police officers following racial injustice protests in 2020.
Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — and so people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away.
That allows them to hop on the local bus system — free since the pandemic — and head back to the same location, Young said.
“We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”
Maybe socialism can keep a tree watered in the rainforest. There are some thriving food cooperatives in Brooklyn, with 'environmentally-friendly' products and reduced plastic waste and removing products from companies and countries they politically object to, like Nestle and Israel. Which works great in an area with a median household income of $160k and low crime rates in a disproportionately white neighborhood. How does socialism work to keep it green in the desert?