The Gouda Fight: One Man’s Mission to Bring an H-E-B to Southern Dallas

Fredrick Terry grew up in South Dallas. His mom made him dinner every night, and his father worked at Kroger. He never asked his mom where she got her groceries; it never came up. But now, the semiretired Terry prefers to shop after shifts at his job in North Dallas, rather than near his house in South Dallas. Thankfully, he has reliable transportation, and so it’s not an issue.

The Dallas native, who attended Roosevelt High School for one year before graduating from Hillcrest as part of the generation bused around the city, wants an H-E-B in his neighborhood.

He’s not mad about it. He honestly just wants good cheese and salsa. “I deserve smoked Gouda too,” Terry says, adding that the grocery chain’s salsa is his favorite. When talking about his mission to bring an H-E-B to southern Dallas, he quickly vacillates between hard data points and foodie jokes.

Terry left Dallas in 1996 for his career in HR, but after retirement, he returned to his hometown and bought the house where he grew up.

“When I left in ’96, there were no grocery stores here,” he says, “The closest grocery store to us, at least that claimed to have quality food, was the one at Wynwood. And if I could wave my magic wand, I would close that store tomorrow. That store is awful.”

He grew up in a family that made its living in the grocery business. His father worked at Kroger for 43 years, and it was also his first job out of college.

The Receipts

Terry has all the receipts. He knows the median income for H-E-B stores in San Antonio. He knows how many acres the stores in Houston sit on. He digs through the Dallas Central Appraisal District data and knows every plot of land that H-E-B owns.

“And every city that they’re in, San Antonio, Austin and Houston being the examples,” he says, “they’ve already built in the inner city, and they built in ZIP codes that are comparable from a median income standpoint to 75208, where they own property. That’s what I’m trying to get them to see.”

Terry even went as far as to rent a mobile advertising truck for two weeks with a simple question: “H-E-B, why won’t you open in Dallas?” along with a QR code to his site, hebwhy.net.

One day, he instructed the truck driver to park in the H-E-B North Texas headquarter’s parking lot. He was hoping they would come out and talk to the driver.

“They played it well,” Terry says with a big smile. “They didn’t take the bait.” But another day, he had the driver go to a Central Market, and that time they did ask him to leave, he says with a fair-is-fair shrug

“I live in 75203, which is on the east side of 35. I would not expect them to ever build over there. That median income is under $40,000, or it was under $40,000 in 2020. But where they built, where they own, the property that they own is 75208, that median income is right at $67,000,” meaning the neighborhood could easily support a store.

And he realizes that H-E-B’s real estate team knows this, too, but he wants them to know people (like him) are watching.

“You’re not just going to tell me, ‘Well, the median income doesn’t work.’ The median income works here because you’ve built in places in San Antonio that even have a lower average median income. And you build a flagship store there.”

We have the money, he says, “We need a store. We need someone to build it.”

Butt Where?

H-E-B owns two contiguous lots in the Bishop Arts District. One is at 111 East Davis St. and the other at 632 N. Beckley. “They cover 2.56 acres,” Terry explains in an email. For now, this is a big empty lot surrounded by new apartments and some retail spaces. The Bishop Arts community has grown around it, but the cold, grey cement remains vacant.

“This lot is comparable to the lot size of the H-E-B at 5225 Buffalo Speedway in Houston, the store that is across Highway 59 from Joel Olsteen’s church,” he says.

“The appraisal district land valuation for the property in Oak Cliff is $4 million. That is the second-highest appraised value of any parcel they own in Dallas. And it’s just a vacant lot,” he says.

The only thing H-E-B is doing with this lot is protesting the taxes (and losing).

“It [the Olsteen adjacent store] is a 90,000-square-foot store that sits on 2.49 acres. Another store in Houston at 6055 North MacGregor Drive sits on what I believe to be 4.75 acres. It is in the Third Ward, a largely African American neighborhood. The store opened in 2019 and is also a 90,000-square-foot location,” he says.

A Case of Blight

The problem with empty lots is that, well, they’re empty. Lots left abandoned and unkept often accumulate litter, drag down surrounding property values and lead to increased crime.

Additionally, H-E-B holding onto the undeveloped land prevents other potential grocery stores or businesses from developing the space. Real estate is a big part of the grocery store business, which isn’t lost on Terry.

“In some neighborhoods, H-E-B is a grocer; in other neighborhoods, they are land speculators,” he says. Grocers will buy up land just to make sure a competitor doesn’t drop in and steal business from a nearby store.  

But speculating isn’t helping the southern Dallas community.

“It does appear that their market and marketing strategy is different in North Texas than it’s been down in South Texas and in San Antonio and Austin,” Terry says of the robust number of stores in other Texas cities. “And I can’t tell you why. I can’t make rhyme or reason about it, but it does appear to be different.”

We reached out to H-E-B for comment on developing this site and Terry’s efforts, and did not hear back.