The Dallas city council will consider incentives Wednesday for a Tom Thumb supermarket to be built in southern Dallas’ RedBird business district.
The city’s economic development staff is recommending the council approve tax incentivesup to $5.8 million, mostly from property tax abatements and a sales tax grant, according to a preliminary agenda for Wednesday’s scheduled meeting filed late Friday. The incentives require that the store creates at least 90 jobs paying an average of $15 an hour. The building must be a minimum of 45,000 square feet and open by April 2026.
City Council members have long worked to bring more grocery stores to the southern Dallas area. Tom Thumb has a store in Oak Cliff on Hampton Road and in Duncanville and DeSoto, but no locations in southern Dallas. The longtime Dallas grocery brand has been owned by Idaho-based Albertsons since 2015. Tom Thumb has key dominant locations in some of Dallas’ oldest and upscale neighborhoods including Lakewood, Preston Hollow and the Park Cities.
The once-dying southern Dallas mall property bordered by Camp Wisdom and Westmoreland roads and U.S. Highway 67 and Interstate 20 has been transformed in recent years. It’s a $200 million redevelopment project still in the works.
The addition of a supermarket is a huge piece of the redevelopment project started more than seven years ago by Dallas investor Peter Brodsky.
Brodsky declined to comment, but in an interview last fall, he said a grocery store was a missing amenity for the 450 residents who live in newly built apartments on the property and another 1,000 people who work there in new medical facilities and offices. There’s an area plotted in the RedBird plans for a grocery store adjacent to the Palladium RedBird apartments.
Tom Thumb’s parent company Albertsons has been investing in the brand, remodeling existing stores and building new ones.
A Tom Thumb spokesperson hasn’t been reached for comment. The grocery retailer operates 60 stores in Dallas-Fort Worth. It’s working with a developer to open a store south of Dallas in Waxahachie and is building its third store in Frisco. In 2019 and 2020 it opened two stores in Dallas, in Uptown and near Deep Ellum.
Kroger is in the process of seeking approvals to acquire Albertsons, but the deal has many hurdles including opposition from consumer groups worried about the two dominant national grocers merging and markets becoming less competitive. D-FW is one of the markets that will get strong antitrust scrutiny by federal regulators reviewing the deal. Both retailers have said they don’t expect to complete the merger proposed last year until 2024.
