City officials hope the move will bring more grocery stores to towns with limited access.
In a move to bring more grocery stores to its cities, Rhode Island has become the second state to ban restrictive covenants. The July legislation is a part of Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos’s Fair Price Grocery Agenda. It comes after Matos realized that restrictive covenants were hindering new grocery stores coming to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, which currently has just one for its 45,000residents.
Restrictive or “scorched-earth” covenants allow grocers to vacate stores but disallow future owners from selling food there, sometimes for decades, Lela Nagi writes for the Guardian. Woonsocket has at least three restrictive covenants that severely limit grocery access: Walmart has one in the town that dates back to 2011 and Stop & Shop has had a restrictive covenant on a property since 2004.
The ban lacks a retroactive provision, meaning current covenants will remain in place until they expire. While supportive of the ban, some affordability experts worry that it alone won’t do much to make groceries more affordable.
Read the full story: This US city only has one supermarket for 45,000 people. New legislation seeks to fix that
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