The debate over deed restrictions surfaced when California-based Safeway Inc., which owns the Dominick’s grocery story chain, closed 12 stores in the Chicago area in March 2004. At that time, Dominick’s had a restrictive covenants agreement in place.
“Who are they, because they want to pull up stakes, to say that we can’t have something that’s similar in our neighborhood?” Edie Cavanaugh, executive director of the West Lawn Chamber of Commerce, said to the Daily Southtown on August 15. “That’s just not right.”
Dominick’s spokeswoman Wynona Redmond was quoted in the Southtown article as responding, “it is never the company’s intention to deprive a neighborhood of access to groceries and … in some instances, it has lifted its covenants. We deal with each site on a case-by-case basis. There’s no one-size-fits-all remedy.”
Alderman Manuel Flores on May 2 supported a plan by Dominick’s to build a 50,000-square-foot store in Chicago’s East Village neighborhood. According to the Southtown article, “the supermarket chain agreed not to restrict future use of the property” as a condition for city council permission to build the store.
— John W. Skorburg
