Southeast plan for Save-A-Lot: What would Impact Dallas Capital do?
Today’s DMN article on the city’s latest plans to bring a grocery store to southeast Dallas is evidence of just how difficult community-building can be in long-neglected and underserved neighborhoods.
The city has determined that the best option for getting a grocery store of any sort into southeast Dallas is to:
– Spend $1.5 million to buy and prep the land (near Simpson Stuart and Bonnie View roads) for construction. (This has already won approval.)
– Spend $1.3 million more to build a store on the site. (This will go before council next week.)
– Plus assure $1.1 million in bank financing to the builder.
For that almost $4 million price tag, what does the community get? A Save-A-Lot discount grocery chain, which has agreed to operate the 15,000-square-foot store.
Nothing against Save-A-Lot; for residents in this part of Dallas, a discount grocery is better than no grocery. But I haven’t found any proof that this grocery will spur the kind of positive development around it that another type grocery might. And community meetings in this part of our city have made clear that what residents are looking for is the kind of development that multiplies into more and better options.
My intent here isn’t to pick on Save-A-Lot, but rather to suggest — before City Council approves the next $1.3 million next week — there might be a better way forward .
As an editor/writer who has been on the “Bridging Dallas’ North-South Gap” project for seven-plus years, I’m definitely an advocate for “over-investing” in southern Dallas. But over-investing doesn’t preclude the smartest possible investing. Southern Dallas can only catch up — both in quality of life and in tax base — if every dollar spent translates into real results.
Which brings me to Impact Dallas Capital, a new not-for-profit organization working to stimulate economic development in southern Dallas. This initiative hasn’t gotten a lot of buzz beyond what we wrote, editorially, about it in the top of our latest GrowSouth assessment.
The folks I’ve talked with — some of whom are not “rah rah, whatever the Mayor says” types — think Mike Rawlings and his team are on to something with this innovative idea.
While commenters on our editorial labeled the editorial “bizarre” and expressed immediate contempt for the Impact Dallas strategy, my sources don’t see anything sneaky about the plan. I’ve been told by some trustworthy folks that everyone involved in Impact Dallas has the right intentions.
Experience leads me to support business leadership’s strategy for southern Dallas economic development over what often comes out of a well-meaning but not always well-conceived City Hall staff strategy. There’s something about this Save-A-Lot plan that feels more like throwing money at a symbolic, but unsatisfactory, solution.
So here’s what I propose Mayor Rawlings and the Council do before going forward with exchanging $2.8 million for a Save-A-Lot lease: Why not run this proposal by Impact Dallas? The list of its board of directors and investors indicates that some of the best financial and investment minds in the city are participating. What do they think? Is this the best answer to what is undoubtedly a severe food desert? Is there something that Impact Dallas, which is amassing investment capital, could drive more effectively?