I am drawing a line in the sand. Putting a chip on my shoulder. Daring the world to make my day.

I am serving notice to whomever buys and develops the soon-to-be-abandoned Sears store on Ross Avenue. Their project had better benefit the community – because if it doesn’t, they are going to have to deal with me.

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This is our neighborhood, and we are going to have a say in what happens to it.

We have spent too much time and too much effort and too much money improving East Dallas during the past decade to allow some fly-by-night developer (and make no mistake, neither Sears nor the City especially cares who buys the site) to get his grubby little hands on this choice bit of real estate.

Too much progress has been made revitalizing Lower Greenville – from the Habitat for Humanity homes in nearby Garrett Park East to the creation of an invigorating retail and restaurant strip – to tolerate anything that will work against the improvements.

One of the central tenets of urban planning is that when you build good things in a neighborhood – churches, schools, shopping – you have a good neighborhood. When you build bad things – sleazy bars, strip joints, day-labor agencies – you have a bad neighborhood.

So who wants to bet that someone, somewhere, has their greedy, little eyes focused on the Sears’ site for a flea market or a gigantic country and western nightclub? After all, those seem to be the only two things developers build in East Dallas these days.

But it’s not going to happen. In fact, to make the job easier, here is a list of what East Dallas needs. Anyone who buys the site should keep these ideas in mind. It will save them a lot of trouble.

• A discount department store. When Target open its new store near Cityplace in the fall, there will be two discount department stores in the approximately 20-square-mile area that makes up East Dallas. This hardly seems equitable, since there are two super discount department stores within a couple of blocks of each other at Park Lane and North Central Expressway.

Retailers always give two reasons why they don’t open stores in East Dallas. First, there isn’t any land. Second, there aren’t enough customers with lots of disposable income (i.e., too many poor people). Well, now there is going to be land, and I never realized you had to be really rich to shop at Wal-mart.

And any developer who holds up Sears’ experience as a reason for not coming down here needs to get his brain fixed. Any store will go out of business if it is filthy, its inventory is shoddy and incomplete, and if it doesn’t have many employees. What Sears did at Ross Avenue was offer a graduate course in how not to run a store, not point out that East Dallas is inhospitable to retail.

• A grocery store. We don’t have a lot of these, either, as regular readers of this space realize. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Minyard family, East Dallas south of Mockingbird Lane wouldn’t have any decent grocery stores at all. Too many of the stores down here, such as the Kroger on Henderson Avenue, are dirty, under-stocked and under-staffed.

These stores should be embarrassments for companies that claim to worry about customer service, but you don’t have to study the retail situation in East Dallas long to discover that we aren’t considered important enough to deserve service.

Now is the time for Food Lion to show us what great guys they are, and not what great guys they claim to be. If they are really committed to Texas, why not open a store on the Sears site? So far, they have managed to build all of their Dallas-area stores everywhere but in Dallas. It’s almost enough to make me feel inferior to someone who lives in Garland.

There are a number of other possibilities for this site, from affordable, low-density, multifamily housing to a series of shops and restaurants similar to the Citiplace mini-mall in Deep Ellum. What’s important, though, is that we help to decide what goes in, and that the decision isn’t rammed down our throats.

Neighborhood resident Jeff Siegel writes a regular column concerning people and issues affecting our neighborhoods. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Advocate’s management and/or ownership.