On Tuesday, H-E-B announced it's opening two more Central Markets in Dallas, including one at West Northwest Highway and Midway Road — a four-mile, 10-minute drive from the Preston Royal Central Market.

"When I saw that story last night," Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Erik Wilson said Wednesday morning. "I was like, 'Really? Really?' "

North Dallas is not lacking in grocery stores stocked with high-quality, high-dollar food items. Not so in Wilson's southeast Dallas neighborhood.

But it's not for City Hall's lack of trying.

In July, the city of Dallas offered at least $3 million to any grocery store willing to sell fresh produce and healthy food in a "southern Dallas food desert." For the first time, the city made it known it had money available, advertising in grocery trade publications. Decades of pleading, of keeping fingers crossed, begat the promise of cold, hard cash.

But officials said Wednesday they never found a taker.

Wilson, who was elected to his first term on the City Council last year, has spent the last two years trying to woo a grocery store to his district, much of which is considered a food desert, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"I've been on an all-out blitz," he said. But as he is fond of saying — and as he posted on his Facebook page Wednesday morning when linking to a news story about the new Central Markets — grocery stores are "unicorn[s] that we know exist, but just can't seem to see" in southern Dallas.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's food desert map for Dallas, last updated on Nov. 17.

Council members had hoped a grocery store chain would agree to open at least one 25,000-square-foot store in southern Dallas — and, preferably, one that could anchor a larger mixed-use development. The city's Office of Economic Development set aside millions from the city's Public/Private Partnership Program, which collects its money from Dallas residents' water bills and often uses it to offer incentives to developers.

The city set Wednesday as the come-and-get-it deadline.

"And nobody came in and said, for instance, 'I want to put an H-E-B- in here, here's the budget, here's the gap, and here's what I am looking for,'" said Karl Zavitkovsky, who heads the Office of Economic Development.

Zavitkovsky said the deadline might have come and gone, but it doesn't close the door on further discussions. The money, he said, will not simply disappear if, months or years from now, a developer steps up with an interest in rehabbing an aging strip center with a grocery as the anchor tenant. And informal discussions with grocery chains will continue, as they have for years.

But it has become increasingly clear to City Hall that simply offering millions for a grocery store in food deserts will not get the job done.

Grocery officials acknowledge as much, offering countless reasons why they don't or won't consider southern Dallas when eyeing new locations even with seven-figure incentives out there for the taking. They point to demographics, customers' buying patterns and density. Wilson said "customer theft" is another reason they won't come south — "an unspoken reason."

A 2007 study by two University of Texas at Dallas professors posited that 400,000 Dallas County residents, many of whom are in low-income neighborhoods, lack access to healthy food and are forced to do their shopping at convenience stores or fast-food restaurants. Things have improved since, if only slightly.

Hammond Perot, assistant director in the city's Office of Economic Development, said there have been a handful of groceries that have opened in southern Dallas in recent years, including a full-service Wal-Mart on Loop 12 and Interstate 35, several Aldis and El Ranchos, and some Save-A-Lots, including the weeks-old location on Stuart Simpson Road in the low-income Highland Hills neighborhood.

The city spent $2.8 million on that one store, with about half that going just toward land acquisition. Tennell Atkins, Wilson's predecessor on the council, told The Dallas Morning News in October that "it's the best investment ever done south of the Trinity River."

That Save-A-Lot didn't come without a fight. In 2014, Atkins was met with much resistance from fellow City Council members, some of whom insisted there wasn't the density to justify the expenditure. North Dallas' Lee Kleinman asked why private investors alone couldn't carry the load.

Two years later, Kleinman was back at the horseshoe advocating for a $3 million incentive for a Costco near the High Five interchage in his council district.

But so far, the Krogers, H-E-Bs and Tom Thumbs of the grocery world have stayed away.

Mabrie Jackson, H-E-B/Central Market's Dallas-based director of public affairs, has long been part of discussions with council members about opening stores in southern Dallas.

Just Wednesday, Jackson said, she and council member Carolyn King Arnold, whose district includes Oak Cliff, exchanged Facebook messages about putting a grocery store in her district. Jackson said she hears frequently from council members who are "very passionate" about the subject.

"And we're respectful of their needs and hope one day we'll be able to help them," she said. "I just don't have a time frame for them — or anyone else in North Texas."

At the moment, H-E-B isn't in North Texas — save, of course, for Central Market. And publicly, at least, the San Antonio-based chain hasn't said if or when it will spread this far north.

If it does, Jackson said, the chain has several formats that might make a good fit in southern Dallas, among them the main brand or Joe V's Smart Shop, a discount store that debuted in Houston in 2010.

"But H-E-B has not made the decision to come to North Texas just yet, and when they do, those discussions will continue to be had," Jackson said. "It's nothing against any sector of town — at all. ... When the time comes, we will design a store that will feed and provide service to those customers and do it really well. But it's really difficult to open a store. It's difficult to open a store in Frisco. It's not just South Dallas."

Dallas City Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Erik Wilson ((David Woo / Staff Photographer))

City Hall has tried to grant incentives for groceries in the past — most infamously, Urbanmarket in downtown Dallas. The city poured more than $600,000 into the market, which was probably in the wrong place (tucked away on Jackson Street) at the wrong time (in 2006, when downtown residents numbered around 3,700 as opposed to the 10,640 who live in the central business district today).

Opening grocery stores, said Joe Williams of the Texas Retailers Association, is "not something you just throw money at."

He said the roadblocks to grocery stores are myriad: lack of easily accessible public transportation, an overabundance of cheap fast food, a reliance on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits that are gone by the end of each month. He also pointed to years' worth of accrued bad habits, and said Dallas needs more programs like Brighter Bites, which brings fresh fruits into public schools in the hopes that kids will tell their parents they want to — and need to — eat better.

"You can't throw money and say, 'We're going to build a store here,' " he said. "If it's not involving the community and doesn't address a change in shopping habits, what's the point?"

Wilson said if he can't get his grocery store, he'll look at other options — including, first, a farmers market. After that, he said, it's time to consider mobile groceries, which serve food deserts in other cities. Whatever it takes.

"What we're doing right now isn't working," he said. "But people have to eat."