Jeannine Johansen remembers the halcyon days of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, when so many of its steep streets were punctuated by grocery stores: Almacs, A&P, Piggly Wiggly and Star Market. In the blizzard of 1978, “everybody went to Fernandes [Produce] because Stop & Shop was too far, and all the roads were closed, so we had to walk”, said the native Woonsocketer.
These days, Woonsocket is down to one full-service supermarket: a solitary Price Rite serving 45,000 residents, 37% of them food insecure , perched at the top of a hill in a strip mall at the edge of the city. A nearby Dollar General offers frozen meat and packaged foods. Locals with cars ( 18% of Woonsocket residents have no vehicle) might travel farther afield, beyond Woonsocket’s borders, to Shaw’s or Aldi in search of deals.
Meanwhile, every week about 300 families shop for free produce and pantry staples at a bus-accessible marketplace hosted by community non-profit Connecting for Children and Families, where Johansen volunteers – although the need is much greater than organizers can accommodate. In the past, “you had a lot of choice”, said Johansen, “so you could shop around for good prices”. She recognizes more local supermarkets jockeying for customers would make provisioning more convenient and affordable.
Restrictive covenants, however, have long stymied that competition. Chains such as Stop & Shop and Walmart often write these provisions into a grocery building’s deed or lease. Commonly, they disallow food from being sold in that spot, sometimes for decades, when the company vacates that store. The company may have opened another location a few miles away and wants customers to travel there; it most assuredly wants to prevent rival grocers from siphoning off shoppers. Supermarket restrictive covenants have flown largely under the radar for half a century, even as they’ve made lingering food deserts out of the communities they presumably serve.
Woonsocket has at least three restrictive covenants that severely limit grocery access for this community – including on the space vacated by Stop & Shop back in 2004 . Walmart quit town in 2011 , leaving behind yet another restrictive covenant that barred both grocers and pharmacies from moving into its abandoned space.
In attempt to improve the grocery landscape, in July, as part of Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s Fair Price Grocery Agenda , Rhode Island became the second state to ban these so-called “scorched-earth” covenants, a small but growing wave of food security-focused legislation meant to ease the soaring expenses walloping Americans at the supermarket checkout. So far, these covenants have been banned in Chicago; Washington, DC; Madison, Wisconsin; and Bellingham and Seattle, Washington, and then the whole of Washington state. As of this writing, the California state senate was getting ready for a floor vote on its own ban – the last legislative stop before the desk of the governor, Gavin Newsom. Meanwhile, four US senators have requested that the Federal Trade Commission assess its ability to regulate the grocery industry’s use of restrictive covenants, indicating interest in pursuing a federal ban.
Lawsuits claiming that restrictive covenants violate US antitrust law have been brought against grocery companies over the years. Judges have tended to side with the grocers. “[A]ntitrust law exists to prevent reduced output, decreased product quality, or higher prices from harming consumers – not to achieve other ‘multiple goals’ (such as promoting fairness, improving income inequality, or preserving the job market),” one legal scholar wrote .
Laurie Beyranevand, director for the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at the Vermont Law and Graduate Center, believes vaguely written antitrust laws need redefining. She explained that part of the problem with trying to use these laws to regulate grocers is that they require plaintiffs to “show that there’s a monopoly. But if regionally there are still other grocers that are available, it could be a challenge to demonstrate that there’s some sort of monopoly that they’re holding.” That’s left states and municipalities to figure out their own fixes, piecemeal.
Unearthing restrictive covenants requires extensive sleuthing through state business listings, municipal databases and hundreds of pages of real estate documents. No one has any idea of how many there are. Rhode Island has dug up seven so far, including a 75-year-term one that was buried in a 128-page condominium agreement (although, per earlier state law, it would have been invalid after 30 years). In California, their extent is “the million-dollar question”, said Beth Smoker, policy director at the California Food and Farming Network , an advocacy group that sponsored that state’s bill.
“Hunger is only increasing in California, then at the same time the cost of food is skyrocketing,” Smoker said about the urgency around passing these bans. “The pandemic and tariffs and inflation are contributing to that, and corporate profiteering in the large-scale grocery industry is also a hidden cause. It just became time that we start addressing hunger from multiple angles.”
Matos, the Rhode Island lieutenant governor, only learned about restrictive covenants when she invited the National Supermarket Association (NSA) of independent grocers to sniff out where a new grocery store could be built in Woonsocket. Discovering a covenant on the former Walmart, “I was in disbelief; I couldn’t believe that this was legal,” she said. Such a tailor-made space – a full-size supermarket needs at least 30,000 sq ft that can support massive amounts of plumbing and electricity – should represent a great opportunity for an independent grocer such as Michael Fernandez. He owns a mini chain called Brigido’s Fresh Market and is vice-president of the NSA’s New England chapter. But a covenant means “we can’t even look at it”, he said.
Restrictive covenants leave residents to scratch their heads about why a wealth of grocery choice has dwindled to no choice at all. These agreements, along with high costs and dynamic prices that change based on demand (another target of Matos’s food agenda, meant to protect Snap recipients from a surge just as their benefits arrive), are “slowly strangling us”, said one senior citizen waiting to shop at the non-profit discount Hope Market in East Providence, an area with poor food access and at least two active restrictive covenants. Fernandez calls the Rhode Island ban a “gamechanger for us in our business”.
That’s because bans have worked in other communities. New Zealand passed a country-wide ban in 2022, and since then independent and specialty grocers have begun to thrive . Washington DC saw 20 new grocery stores open in the five years after its 2017 ban , although it’s unclear how strong the correlation is between ban and boon.
Matos admits Rhode Island’s ban is just the first step in improving grocery access. It has no retroactive provision, meaning existing covenants will remain in effect until they run their contractual course; Matos said this was necessary to push some legislation through before Stop & Shop, which controls 42% of the state’s grocery market, had a chance to slap more restrictive covenants on properties as it closes more and more of its stores. Some food security experts, while broadly supportive of the ban, are concerned that, alone, it won’t move the affordability needle much. And few if any municipalities currently have the resources to do what DC did a few years back: pay Safeway almost $4m to release a grocery space from a covenant.
California, on the other hand, wrote into its pending ban a retroactive provision – already used in the state’s housing industry – that allows a would-be grocer to ask the county to void a restrictive covenant. In low-food-access Eureka , this would allow the 15 remaining years on a 50-year covenant to vanish practically overnight.
“Hunger is happening now – we can’t wait 15 years. That’s an entire childhood,” said Smoker. (A spokesperson for the California Grocers Association said that the organization supported efforts to expand food access but that there are “scenarios where lease restrictions are still appropriate for grocers looking to relocate within close proximity to an existing store, in order to invest in and improve its offering for the community”.)
Still, there are other challenges to getting supermarkets up and running in the communities that need them. One of these is a dearth of capital for smaller operators, which Mohammed Zameeruddin has experienced first-hand. He’s the owner of Daily Stop , a grocery store in Providence, with another being constructed in Woonsocket.
Determined to offer culturally relevant foods to Woonsocket’s Muslim, Latino, African and other populations, Zameeruddin leased the only truly viable space in a city with multiple restrictive covenants – a former Sears that requires an extensive and costly retrofit. Financing, however, has been bumpy and has led to delays in opening. “We thought the cost would be $3m or $4m. But it’s costing more than double,” he said. “You’re a small guy but the building, the contractor, the cost of everything is high.” Nevertheless, he hopes to open by December.
Across the road from the future Daily Stop, a restrictive covenant on a site now housing a military recruiting office won’t run out until 2034, so it will be a few years before that can be freed up for another potential grocery space. But in Richmond, south-east of Providence, a lease held by Stop & Shop on a supermarket-ready property recently expired after being vacant for 30 years . The new ban ensures that a restrictive covenant cannot be added to the new lease. (Stop & Shop did not immediately respond to a request for comment on restrictive covenant legislation.) Fernandez hopes all this means things are looking up for independent grocers, who he believes are more responsive to community needs.
“These big stores, they don’t care so much about the neighborhoods that they’re serving. They just respond to shareholders,” he said. “One hundred per cent, we’re a voice, we’re ears, we listen, and we cater the store to the area we’re in.”
At least one resident of Woonsocket is ready for this kind of grocery turnaround. “It’s big,” Johansen said about the competition to Shop Rite that the pending opening of Daily Stop represents. “If they open, it’s huge.”
These days, Woonsocket is down to one full-service supermarket: a solitary Price Rite serving 45,000 residents, 37% of them food insecure , perched at the top of a hill in a strip mall at the edge of the city. A nearby Dollar General offers frozen meat and packaged foods. Locals with cars ( 18% of Woonsocket residents have no vehicle) might travel farther afield, beyond Woonsocket’s borders, to Shaw’s or Aldi in search of deals.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Lela Nargi. Published 28 Aug 2026, 03:00 pm.
