OAKLAND — After years of trekking to Emeryville or Alameda for groceries, West Oakland residents soon will have the best supermarket a collection of green-card-hungry foreign investors can buy.

Businessman Tom Henderson is raising eyebrows even among boosters of the hardscrabble district by announcing plans to open a full-service grocery store that he says will make “Safeway look like a 7-Eleven.”

No bank would have considered financing the independent market slated for the Jack London Gateway shopping center, where several supermarkets have gone out of business over the past three decades, Henderson said.

But that’s of little concern to him.

The 66-year-old Oakland resident, whose companies own several downtown office buildings, including the Tribune Tower, has made a name for himself in recent years by using a federal program in which wealthy foreigners bankroll projects that create domestic jobs in return for permanent residency in the U.S.

The federal EB-5 visa program is designed to spur investment in poorer areas where traditional credit is harder to obtain. Investors typically are more interested in getting their green cards than making a profit.

Henderson’s EB-5 ventures through his San Francisco Regional Center — not all of which have panned out — include a call center, nursing home and warehousing company. The supermarket, which, at 20,000 square feet, would be bigger than a Trader Joe’s but smaller than a Safeway, is projected to create 80 jobs when it opens before the end of the year, Henderson said.

Nearly as important to Henderson, the market will have wood floors, french doors, an in-house nutritionist, and, he insists, quality produce at affordable prices. “I want people to come in and be proud that it is open in West Oakland,” he said.

West Oakland is one the city’s fastest-changing districts, with many young professionals and artists displacing a well-established African-American community. It also lacks a market the size of which Henderson is committed to building.

Shops that serve the newcomers sometimes face cries of gentrification — a high-end coffee shop was vandalized last year. But the concerns swirling around Henderson’s store, tentatively dubbed West End Market, aren’t that it will gentrify the community, but that it will fall victim to the entrenched poverty of its immediate surroundings and make traditional lenders less willing to support future supermarket projects.

Henderson’s market will anchor a struggling 7-acre shopping center at 800 Market Street, on the edge of West Oakland’s Acorn neighborhood. With one of the city’s highest concentrations of permanently low-income housing projects, the neighborhood has been resistant to the gentrification taking place around it.

“No one wants to go and get shot at Eighth Street,” said Alex Miller-Cole, a West Oakland resident and businessman, referencing the neighborhood’s well-chronicled gang problem. “I’m obviously very excited and hopeful that it will work, but I told him it will be very hard because the median income of that area does not support a supermarket — it supports a dollar store.”

Asked what kind of supermarket he’d like to see in the plaza, Tyrone Johnson, who lives a block away, said a FoodMaxx or a dollar store. Nelly Moore said she’d like a Foods Co. “I don’t want a Lucky’s or a Pak N Save because they are too high for our little income,” she said. The shopping center’s anchor space has been vacant since a Korean-themed market went out of business in 2007. Since then, both Fresh & Easy and a nonprofit raising money to open a community-funded supermarket turned down the space.”We thought we’d get cornered into a difficult site and would find it hard to be successful, said Brahm Ahmadi, head of the People’s Community Market.

Ahmadi, whose effort has been slowed by rising real estate prices, pointed to a 2011 market analysis he commissioned showing that a site at West Grand Avenue in the heart of West Oakland would generate 50 percent to 60 percent more revenue than Henderson’s location.

That same study found that the immediate customer base for a grocery store consisted of about 25,650 residents in West Oakland, where the median household income was just $27,971.

Henderson hasn’t done a feasibility study, but he questioned Ahmadi’s figures and said that the demand for a supermarket is clear.

“I don’t see any risk,” he said. “Every single person we talked to said, ‘We have to have a grocery store.’ There are enough people here to support it.”

Henderson has a major financial stake in the supermarket’s success. He recently purchased a 75 percent stake in the shopping plaza, so the market also will be his anchor tenant. Henderson estimated the project will cost a total of $25 million.

His partner in the shopping center and the supermarket is the community-based West Oakland Marketplace Advancement, which had struggled for years to land a grocery store and will help make sure Henderson’s store serves the needs and tastes of local residents.

“It has to be affordable,” the organization’s founder, Janet Patterson, said. “We’re not trying to price people out of food.”

The shopping center purchase was financed through a traditional lender, Henderson said, but the market, along with a planned commercial kitchen and a restaurant, will be funded through the federal visa program.

Participating foreign investors get a temporary green card for themselves and their family in return for a $500,000 investment. They receive permanent residence if after two years Henderson can show that the investment produced 10 jobs.

So far, Henderson said he has directly created nearly 500 jobs through the visa program. That’s fewer than the 2,000 jobs he told this paper in 2013 that he’d have within two years, although Henderson says he’s on track to meet his job requirements.

Some ventures never got off the ground, and others, such as a hearing aid assembly plant, have been delayed, he said.

Last year, Henderson settled a lawsuit filed by restaurateur Chris Pastena, whose claims included that Henderson didn’t come through with EB-5 funding for their aborted restaurant partnership, which included the Tribune Tavern. Henderson said the restaurants were never to be funded by the visa program; terms of the settlement are shielded by a nondisclosure agreement.

Henderson still has the support of city officials, including Mayor Libby Schaaf and West Oakland community leaders who point to his track record of hiring local residents for his ventures.

“I’m confident in Mr. Henderson,” said Matthew Graves of the Oakland Youth First center. “He has kept his word on the projects that he has brought to Oakland.”

Henderson’s promise of building an upscale store with affordable prices could pose a bigger challenge. Lacking the purchasing power of big chains, Henderson’s store likely won’t be able to compete pricewise with discount stores like FoodMaxx, but it could stay relatively competitive with Safeway while offering upmarket produce, said Jon Hauptman, a partner with Willard Bishop, an Illinois-based retail industry consulting firm.

“It certainly appears to be an economically challenged area,” he said. “But they will have the advantage of a population that is in need of a food store. Because of that, they could make it work.”

Contact Matthew Artz at 510-208-6435.