Arrested Development
By Jonmaesha Beltran / ecoRI News staff
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| The former supermarket was once an A&P store before Stop & Shop acquired it. The property has sat vacant since 2005, when its only tenant, Cycling Brothers Motor Sports, shut its doors. (Jonmaesha Beltran/ecoRI News) |
Julie Harney grew up within the same 41 square miles where she first watched airplanes lift off, developed a passion for horses and now raises her own children.
The 45-year-old, who spends her days answering questions
that help develop new medicines, has had one question linger in her mind for
most of her adulthood: how do you fill the vacancies in Chariho Plaza?
The Richmond shopping center has struggled to retain tenants as businesses closed and others outgrew their space, while its ownership changed hands over the years.
Four vacancies remain: a boarded-up gas station, two former
retail storefronts and an empty supermarket building. But none has drawn more
attention in the town of 8,000 than the vacant grocery store that Stop &
Shop has held on to for three decades.
Grocery chains are known to engage in anti-competitive
behavior by implementing restrictions in deeds and leases that prohibit the
sale of groceries in certain properties to limit nearby competition. The
practice deepens barriers to access to healthy foods and has left buildings and
lots vacant for decades in rural and urban communities.
Researchers have also found another tactic: vacating a
property yet continuing to pay the rent.
“It appears that Ahold/Stop & Shop will employ virtually
any means available to stifle competition,” University of Connecticut Professor
Ronald Cotterill wrote in a 2002 research paper.
Lt. Gov. Sabina Matos’ staff have searched for restrictive
covenants across the state, and some of their findings include examples where
Stop & Shop has left commercial property frozen: a demolished Almacs plaza
in Coventry and the building in Richmond.
While property records show the company owns the land in
Coventry through a subsidiary, it leases a parcel in Richmond while retaining
ownership of the building on top of it.
Matos has pushed to outlaw restrictive covenants in the grocery
sector in Rhode Island, and congressional leaders have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate
their use as antitrust violations.
As residents watch how those efforts will affect areas where a restrictive covenant doesn’t exist, Richmond residents are looking for ways to bring new life to Chariho Plaza.
“It’s really disappointing that nothing yet has taken hold
to create something better in that location,” Harney said.
Unfinished business
The location has become a bipartisan concern, with both town
Republicans and Democrats raising questions about how to put the property back
to use.
Former councilor Paul Michaud’s frustration over its
condition boiled over during a 2019 council meeting, where he criticized Stop
& Shop for neglecting the property and questioned whether anything inside
had survived years of decay.
He feared the company had its eye on a vacant Walgreens
property and would treat it the same way it does the building in Chariho Plaza.
“They’re buying up property and keeping it empty,” Michaud
said during the meeting. “I’m getting tired of Stop & Shop doing this.”
Property records show Stop & Shop holds a lease for
nearly 31,000 square feet at the plaza, an arrangement dating back to 1986,
when A&P secured rights to the building through a ground lease with the
shopping center’s owner.
A&P poured millions into expanding its Richmond store by
replacing its smaller building with a new supermarket, The Providence Journal
once reported.
The expansion was part of A&P’s attempt to reclaim the
dominance it once held over the grocery industry after antitrust scrutiny and
mounting competition fractured it.
The plaza’s owner predicted the new supermarket would help
it become southern Rhode Island’s dominant shopping center.
The vision lasted until 1995, when A&P transferred the
lease to Edwards Super Food Store, a chain that was under the control of retail
giant Ahold Delhaize.
A new era of grocery consolidation was reshaping the
industry by then, as foreign retailers were expanding into the U.S. amid
weakening antitrust enforcement.
The Dutch company’s acquisitions of Edwards and Stop & Shop drew scrutiny and forced it to shed 29 stores, including seven in Rhode Island, to two Massachusetts-based chains.
Food industry experts told The Providence Journal that the
move would benefit consumers and create a market where price and service
dominate. But independent grocers and union workers at stores slated for sale
in South County feared being squeezed out.
“There isn’t enough room for three major supermarkets in
town,” Vincent Siravo, the owner of Belmont Market, told the Journal.
The Richmond store wasn’t affected, but Ahold Delhaize
shifted its focus away from the former A&P building.
The company followed another departing Chariho Plaza tenant
in 1997 to vacant land near the interstate at the intersection of Stilson Road
and Route 138. It opened the town’s only full-scale grocery store, which is
less than a mile away from its former Main Street location.
Commercial development report
The Main Street property sits in the village of Wyoming, one
of the seven villages that make up the town of Richmond, and was once defined
by iron manufacturing. Interstate 95 transformed Richmond’s villages into
commuter communities that attracted residents seeking a rural lifestyle,
according to the town’s historical society.
Developers marketed the Chariho Plaza as a retail hub
positioned to capitalize on interstate traffic, a planned nearby housing
development and little competition in the 1960s.
They filled it with the A&P store, a post office, liquor
store, and a dry cleaner, while continuing to recruit new tenants, an
advertisement in The Providence Journal showed.
The village had “awakened from a long sleep” by the 1980s,
one resident wrote in an article, as commercial development spread across the
community.
Some of the developments were in trouble a decade later,
including the plaza, when Rhode Island’s credit union crisis sent shockwaves
through the state.
Years of bad loans and risky investments destabilized
financial institutions, while an embezzlement scandal involving a banker
deepened the crisis and fueled a surge in bankruptcy filings, according to
local and national reporting.
Property records show a Superior Court judge placed the plaza into receivership before it changed hands several times and landed with Capstone Properties in 2012.
Businesses have come and gone from Chariho Plaza over the
years, leaving the post office as its longest-standing tenant after the loss of
a grocery store.
Redeveloping the plaza that one resident said in planning
documents looked as though the “town was subject to a forced evacuation” is
part of Richmond’s efforts to strengthen the town as a place where residents
can live, work, dine and gather without losing its rural identity.
Officials focused on the village of Wyoming, particularly
its “downtown” business district, as the best place to signal that the town is
“open for business.” The village is the only part of town served by municipal
water, according to Richmond’s comprehensive plan.
Attracting a new anchor tenant in the plaza has remained
difficult, as town leaders have said in meetings that the former grocery store
space cannot be used for another food or beverage retailer.
The town could probably benefit from a clothing store,
Harney told ecoRI News.
A motion was made
Capstone Properties, the owner of Chariho Plaza, pitched a
new future for the shopping center to local leaders in 2015.
The company presented renderings showing a renovated plaza
that included additional storefronts and upgrades to existing buildings,
according to the town’s economic development commission meeting minutes.
Meeting minutes from the years that followed show town
officials pressed for updates. They discussed plans to send a letter to the
plaza owners requesting rehabilitation plans, floated the idea of Stop &
Shop donating its building to the town, and questioned whether raising taxes or
offering tax incentives could push redevelopment.
Rhode Island allows municipalities to impose taxes on vacant
properties, but those efforts have focused on blighted housing rather than
empty commercial storefronts. Some cities, including Washington, D.C., which
banned grocery-restrictive covenants in 2018, have adopted commercial vacancy
taxes to curb blight.
Even Harney said she had wondered whether a blight ordinance
modeled on those authorized in Connecticut could spur movement at the plaza.
Still, some elected officials have said in a voter guide that the town cannot force a property owner to rent or renovate a building. They also blamed one another for comments made during public meetings and unethical behavior that they said jeopardized revival efforts.
“We don’t dictate what companies come here or don’t,”
councilor Jim Palmisciano told ecoRI News, adding that elected officials can
only shape the regulations and environment intended to attract business
investment.
Tension surfaced during a 2023 council meeting when Capstone
Properties representative Rick Zini said that, before new development can
happen, the town must decide what it wants and how it will be regulated.
“That needs to be settled before any developer or major
taxpayer is going to make additional investment in the town,” Zini added.
Councilor Daniel Madnick, former vice chair of the town’s
planning board, has pushed to ease barriers for development in the village,
including groundwater regulations and traffic congestion along Route 138, where
the plaza sits.
The council revised the town’s aquifer protection ordinance
to allow for more commercial projects. Madnick said the change hasn’t triggered
a wave of new applicants, but it hasn’t stopped plans from moving forward
either.
Route 138 cuts through the town from Kingston Road to
Nooseneck Hill and carries more traffic than the narrow state-owned road was
designed to handle, Madnick said.
He pushed the Rhode Island Department of Transportation
(RIDOT) to study the corridor and include widening projects in the State
Transportation Improvement Plan.
But Madnick said the state is not expected to prioritize
work on the road until sometime in the 2030s. More economic effort in the area,
he said, could help move the proposal higher on RIDOT’s list.
New business
Capstone Properties and Ahold Delhaize representatives have not responded to ecoRI News’ request for comment about barriers to attracting new tenants to the plaza. But Palmisciano and Madnick said they met with retail officials in a May 19 council meeting as part of ongoing efforts to revive the property.
The meeting followed the councilors’ outreach to a state
representative for help. Madnick told ecoRI News that a suggestion emerged to
create a redevelopment agency that could address blight and, if necessary, use
eminent domain when properties cannot be redeveloped through private
investment.
He shelved the plan after an opportunity to meet with the
retail giant arrived.
Madnick said the plaza’s conditions are “embarrassing,” but
he’s reluctant to pursue a “stick approach” and instead is hoping the company
will move forward with redevelopment plans in the next few years.
Vacancy taxes and eminent domain are seen as last-resort
options because those efforts involve high costs and lengthy processes,
according to Matos, a former Providence City Council member.
“We always try to find an amicable resolution in which we
can work with the carrot instead of the stick,” she said.
The former supermarket has had one tenant since Stop &
Shop moved: Cycle Brothers Motor Sports, whose tenancy didn’t last long.
As for attracting another grocery store to the area, Matos
said her staff has been reaching out to independent grocers and chains to
stress the need in underserved communities, especially in Richmond, where the
prolonged vacancy has driven some residents away from shopping at Stop &
Shop.
“This is an example of a large corporation creating a
monopoly and taking advantage of a largely rural population’s basic needs and
is simply just wrong,” Harney wrote in an email.
