The short answer: Probably this decade!
Central Market bought a piece of land in Oak Cliff in 2017, part of the old Dallas County Schools property on West Davis at Beckley Avenue. The company said then that it was buying the land “in anticipation of our future expansion needs.”
Since then, the Novel Bishop Arts apartments and a CVS were built, opened and populated on two corners of that intersection. Yet no dirt has turned on the northeast corner, which Central Market’s parent company, H-E-B, owns.
Grocery industry insiders tell us two things to indicate that Central Market will open a store there eventually.
- H-E-B isn’t in the business of land speculation. That is, the company doesn’t typically buy land just to sit on it for wealth-building, with the intention to sell later. When they buy land, it’s because they intend to build a store on it. We also know that Central Market is serious about the Oak Cliff location because they allowed Novel Bishop Arts to include their name in marketing materials.
- Central Market historically trends opening a new store only about every five years in the same market.
Central Market’s next Dallas store will be on Lemmon at McKinney avenues, where there previously was an Albertson’s, the Dallas Morning News reports. That store will be on the ground floor of a planned 19-story apartment and hotel building. Construction is starting soon, and it will take two years to build.
That makes 2022 the earliest Central Market could open its Uptown store. Assuming Oak Cliff is next in line, and that’s what real estate insiders told us in 2017, that would put us, on the upside, at 2027. (Update: A design for the construction project that includes Central Market in Uptown was approved in May 2021)
