Giving Compass' Take:

• The author explains the unfortunate experiences of communities that live in food deserts and how they deal with grocery stores that have deed restrictions. These restrictions do not allow other grocery stores to move in to neighborhoods even if a grocery store has closed down.

• How can philanthropists help fund potential solutions for food deserts and communities suffering from punitive grocery deed restrictions?

• Read about how to help eliminate food deserts.

When Jeanette Federigi first moved into an apartment building in Vallejo, California, in 2001, the local Safeway store had recently closed. Her daughter was five at the time; for the rest of her entire childhood, there was no grocery store in the neighborhood.

They may be closing that location but they still want to control the market share of that location.

This wasn’t necessarily a question of the neighborhood being unable to economically sustain a grocery store. In fact, no grocery store was allowed: Safeway had placed a restriction on the deed to the property that said no other supermarket could move in for the next 15 years.

“This is a community that already lacks access to healthy foods,” says Lauren Ornelas, executive director of the Food Empowerment Project, a food justice organization that works in Vallejo. “So what people were forced to do is go to the liquor stores and go to the convenience stores. Those don’t normally offer a lot of fresh produce. They can get the sodas and the chips, sugary foods, but they aren’t necessarily getting fresh produce, which they desperately want.”

The deed restriction in the Vallejo store ended in 2015, and a Grocery Outlet moved in. But when Ornelas learned that similar deed restrictions are used across the grocery industry, she launched a petition and a series of protests asking Safeway to stop the practice.

In part, the challenge is that many people are not even aware that restrictive covenants on grocery stores exist, or may not have the bandwidth to address it. The restrictions are likely more damaging in certain neighborhoods, such as urban areas that are highly developed and don’t have space to build new stores.

Read the full article on grocery stores creating food deserts by Adele Peters at FastCompany