By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday—fresh off a campaign debate at which he asserted that “Trump will walk all over” his opponent, Katie Wilson—Mayor Bruce Harrell announced legislation to ban restrictive, anti-competitive covenants that, he said, are contributing to the lack of pharmacies and grocery stores in certain parts of the city.

“When a company closes a grocery store or pharmacy, they can add a restrictive covenant into a property’s deed or lease that blocks a new grocery or pharmacy from locating at the same place,” Harrell said in a statement announcing the new legislation. “They do this to block competitors, and these actions harm neighborhoods and contribute to grocery and pharmacy deserts.”

Seattle, like other cities, has a growing number of food and pharmacy “deserts” due to a series of consolidations and closures by grocery and pharmacy chains. Rite Aid, which bought Bartell Drugs, has closed at least 40 stores in Washington over the past few months, including every Bartell store. Kroger, which owns Fred Meyer, recently announced plans to close dozens of stores across the country, including several in the Seattle area.

In his announcement, Harrell noted the existence of “at least two covenants restricting … the square footage of any future grocery store at that location for as long as 50 years.”

Curious, we asked for these two examples. Both are currently North Seattle grocery stores.

The first, a Sprouts store that opened in 2020 in North Seattle’s Haller Lake neighborhood, filled a space that had been vacant since the Albertson’s supermarket that had been there closed in 2018. While the covenant on the property, located at N 130th St. and Aurora Ave N, does restrict any grocery to less than 28,000 square feet for 20 years, the rest of the once-vacant space has now been filled by a HomeGoods store—not my personal idea of a highest and best use, but in keeping with the strip-mall built environment of this area just south of Shoreline.

Grocery stores in the immediate vicinity of the Sprouts include an Amazon Fresh, an Asian Family Market, a US ChefStore retail-wholesaler, and several smaller grocers specializing in Ethiopian, Latin American, and Eastern European foods. There’s also a Safeway and a Town and Country Market a couple miles north in Shoreline, a straight shot up Aurora Ave. N. That’s still too far to qualify as convenient, but the area now has one more grocery option than it did a couple years ago, when the old Albertson’s was just a vacant building.

The second covenant Harrell cited in his announcement is also now a grocery store—Trader Joe’s, at the corner of N 87th St. and Greenwood Ave. N, in the heart of the Greenwood neighborhood. The TJ’s, which replaced a single-story, car-oriented Safeway, anchors a new mixed-use development with nearly 300 new apartments. The company did have to comply with a covenant restricting its size to 20,000 square feet, but that’s actually is on the generous side for Trader Joe’s. And fortunately for those who want a big-supermarket experience, there’s a large Fred Meyer store just four blocks away.

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A spokesman for HSD told PubliCola that Trader Joe’s and Sprouts don’t accept benefits under WIC (the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program), which helps pregnant people and new parents buy healthy foods, because they don’t meet WIC’s minimum stocking requirements. That’s a real issue, but it’s related to company policy, not store size. Many large supermarkets in Seattle don’t accept WIC benefits, and some very small convenience stores do; changing WIC policies (for instance, by requiring participation or making it easier for stores to qualify and stay in compliance) is a federal issue, not the purview of the city.

Harrell’s proposal, which Council President Sara Nelson has said she’ll sponsor, won’t hurt anything—and maybe, at some future date, it will even stop a grocery store that’s closing from adding a restrictive covenant in a neighborhood where groceries are actually in short supply. But the legislation, and the flurry of stories that accompanied it, does create the illusory apperaance that the city is taking meaningful action on food deserts, which are primarily in southeast and southwest Seattle, not north of the Ship Canal.

The problem in these areas isn’t that smaller grocery stores are replacing big ones, but that there aren’t enough places to get groceries or fill prescriptions, period. (On Rainier Ave. S. alone, two Rite Aids and a Bartell have closed in recent years and have not been replaced.) Bringing grocery stores and pharmacies back to the parts of town profit-seeking corporations have abandoned won’t be as simple as telling them they can’t restrict the size of future stores when they close.

As a side note, an actual proposed new grocery store in Wedgwood has been mired in the city’s design review process for months. The local design review board finally allowed the project to go forward, subject to future conditions, this week, but not before hours of discussion over whether to make the developer move a proposed child care center, whether to require an on-site restaurant to be open specific hours, and whether to allow “pictures of produce” in store windows —along with, as always, debates over aesthetic details like what type brick the developer can use. Which just goes to show: Even when a company wants to open a grocery store in Seattle, the Seattle Process is often stacked against it.