SACRAMENTO – California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1857, the Grocery Store Access Act, into law. The legislation creates a process to remove grocery store “restrictive covenants,” legal agreements that prevent a property from being used for a new grocery store after one leaves. Millions of low-income Californians live in food deserts. The new law gives communities a way to stop restrictive deeds and bring full-service grocers back to neighborhoods the big chains have abandoned.

Currently, when a grocery chain closes or relocates a store, it can write language into the property’s deed that bars any other grocery store from operating there should the space become vacant. These restrictions can stay in place for several decades. When Safeway closed its downtown Vallejo store, the covenant it left behind blocked any grocery store from taking its place for 15 years. Families in neighborhoods where this happens have to travel farther for groceries or rely on smaller stores with fewer healthy options and higher prices. As Angelica Sanabria recently wrote in SFGATE, the practice “effectively obstructs a community’s access to food and limits its autonomy.”

The problem is tied to a broader pattern of consolidation in the food economy. For most items on a grocery shelf, four or fewer companies control at least half the market. In a concentrated market, a dominant chain, such as an Albertsons or Walmart, can leave a neighborhood and still keep competitors out of it. AB 1857 gives other grocers a path to remove those barriers so they can serve the community.

“A grocery store closing should be the start of a search for a new one, and for too long, California law allowed it to be the end of the conversation. Restrictive covenants let a single company decide that a neighborhood will go without fresh, affordable food for years after it has moved on. Because the governor signed AB 1857, communities that lose a grocery store now have a legal path to bring a new one in,” said Loyal Terry, Legislative Advocate in California for Economic Security Project

“I run a mutual aid farm that feeds more than 5,000 families a year, and every year the need grows. When a chain closes a store and writes language into the deed to keep anyone else from opening there, the families who depended on it have nowhere close to turn. Now, thankfully, a closed store no longer has to mean a neighborhood without groceries,” said Krista Marshall, who runs Seeds of Solidarity, a mutual aid farm in Sacramento.

Food deserts fall hardest on low-income communities and communities of color, and they persist when the rules allow one company’s exit to set the terms for everyone else. By removing a legal barrier to new grocery stores, California is reinforcing a basic principle: open, competitive markets serve families better than markets controlled by a few dominant players.