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When seven Save A Lot grocery stores across Chicago’s South and West Sides closed abruptly, Mayor Brandon Johnson announced that Lyft would provide $25,000 worth of free grocery store rides for residents in need.
It is an arrangement in which a rideshare company steps in to shuttle seniors to food after a corporate grocery chain decided the neighborhood was not worth staying in: In 2022, the city invested $13.5 million in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) to help parent company Yellow Banana LLC acquire and renovate those stores. It is a solution built on private industry fixing a problem private industry created. Chicago has seen this movie before, just with a different vital resource—access to prescription drugs.
As a medical student and pharmacist on the South Side, we have watched this play out firsthand. In early June, the Walgreens in Chatham closed, a topic discussed in our last essay. Patients who once filled their prescriptions now scramble to find a new pharmacy. For decades, Chicago has bet on corporate goodwill to keep our most vulnerable residents connected to medication. That bet keeps losing. It is time we stop making it.
Since 2024, Walgreens has closed multiple locations in Bronzeville, Little Village, South Shore, Chicago Lawn, and South Chicago, part of a national wave of roughly 1,200 store closures the company has tied to profits, not community need. The pattern is not subtle; pharmacy access remains significantly lower in predominantly Black and Latino communities.
Ald. William Hall (6th Ward) recently proposed a city Office of Pharmacy Access to equip community-driven independent pharmacies with tools to stabilize medicine costs and remain financially viable. We believe this is a worthwhile step and support it. But building healthier independent pharmacies is a multi-year project, and South and West Side communities need a pharmacy to show up on their block today, while the city works on the longer-term fix. That is the gap a mobile retail pharmacy unit is built to fill.
Picture a pharmacy on wheels, telling residents the city treats pharmacy deserts with the same urgency it brings to any other emergency. Retrofit a bus into a mobile pharmacy stocked with medications, blood pressure machines, and preventive health screening equipment. These units could be staffed by part-time city-employed pharmacists and technicians who carry a supply of chronic-disease drugs, PrEP, and naloxone. A mobile pharmacy pilot could begin serving abandoned neighborhoods in months, not years.
The price tag is modest by city-budget standards, roughly $200,000 to $350,000 to retrofit and equip a single bus, plus initial inventory. Annual operating costs, covering fuel, maintenance, and staffing, would be a fraction of keeping a storefront pharmacy open. Coverage does not have to start from scratch, either: a partnership with organizations such as Dispensary of Hope could also expand medication access for resource-limited patients.
This isn’t unprecedented. Yale New Haven Health System launched the nation’s first mobile retail pharmacy, InMOTION, roughly two years ago. In its first year, the program engaged hundreds of patients, 41% accepting on-the-spot HIV testing, dispensing PrEP medications, and addiction treatment all directly from the vehicle. Proof that a mobile pharmacy model, even a small one, can reach patients who have been left behind by our healthcare system.
A Chicago pilot would do more than dispense pills. It would bring pharmacists directly into communities to provide medication counseling and health screenings. Rather than rushing patients through typical retail transactions, these units would give pharmacists the time to build trust, improve medication adherence, and become a vital health resource for our communities that have been left behind.
The city could start small: one retrofitted unit rotating through South and West Side neighborhoods on a published schedule, with Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) tracking who shows up, what they need, and what it costs to serve them –– real data to make the case for what comes next.
Chicago has already reached for a quick, visible fix when grocery stores vanished — free Lyft rides to replace the stores that left. But a ride solves nothing if there’s no pharmacy waiting at the other end. If the city is willing to spend money getting people to care, it should be just as willing to bring care to them.
Time and again, it is our South and West Side communities themselves––the clinics, the mutual aid networks, the violence interrupters––who must build and demand solutions to the crisis created by private industry. A mobile pharmacy is one more piece of that tradition: proof that when a system fails us, we cannot simply wait for the next closure. We build what comes next.
A mobile pharmacy would allow Chicago to respond quickly and visibly to a medication crisis, treating it with the same urgency as any other emergency. Demonstrating that corporate abandonment does not get the final say on the health of Chicagoans—public power does.
