Laura Miller promised Oak Cliff a Starbucks. I think that's the only campaign promise she hasn't been able to deliver on at all.

You can't count the little Starbucks kiosk at the new Albertson's grocery store, which closed after a few months to make way for more bananas. Nor the Magic Johnson-subsidized Starbucks in south Oak Cliff. A real, market-driven, full-service Starbucks you cannot find south of downtown . . . until you get to Hillsboro, Texas.

But that may be changing. Rumor has it that Starbucks has on its radar a north Oak Cliff site across from Methodist Hospital, near 600 new apartments, and on the way home for residents of affluent Kessler Park (who have included Mayor Miller).

A real-estate buddy told me that Starbucks has a sophisticated but rigid demographic analysis for locating stores, a calculus that Oak Cliff has never been able to crack. Do we finally qualify? Is that good?

A few blocks from the proposed Starbucks site lies the Bishop Arts District, a collection of 40 or so pre-World War II buildings surrounding what was once the first major trolley stop south of downtown. Trolley-stop shopping districts once dotted Dallas like - well, like Starbucks, but they're almost all gone now. Ours is the largest left intact, and we owe its existence to the fact that no one has ever wanted to build anything in its place.

And within the Bishop Arts District is the Nodding Dog Coffee Company, our neighborhood coffee bar. A few months ago locals Gus Trevino and Darren Humphrey opened Nodding Dog on a shoestring budget in a location that was the original ground-zero for the Bishop Arts District back in the trolley days, the Bishop Pharmacy and Soda Fountain. Nodding Dog (named for Gus's palsied pooch) is what Starbucks is meant to emulate and idealize - a soda counter in a neighborhood storefront with gossip being traded among locals lounging on retired living room furniture.

Last week as I sipped my morning brew at a sidewalk table, I spied an elderly member of my church leaving her chair at Oline's Salon across the street - her scalp a mass of foil spikes - to buy herself and her hairdresser a cup of coffee while the dye set. On her way in she greeted a shop owner who drank latte and watched his front door and cash register from a chair 50 yards distant.

Can you imagine the equivalent happening among the denizens of West Village? "Hey, Nicole, trying a new color? Oops, gotta go, I see someone waiting at my register back at The Gap."

Our city councilwoman assures me that Starbucks would not hurt the Nodding Dog. Different crowd, different market. I'm not so sure. Even though Oak Cliffers pride themselves in shopping local and resisting homogenization, a predictable percentage would make Starbucks their new "coffee home" (like folks used to refer to their "church home"). I thought those 600 new apartments with their pseudo-architecture wouldn't draw any tenants from the area's rich collection of 1920's apartment buildings, but they did. Heck, they offer free Internet.

And so does Starbucks. When a friend and I stumbled into a Starbucks after seeing The Passion of the Christ, we were surrounded by Uptowners huddled noiselessly over the blue glow of laptops, ethereally connected to the world of the Web, eerily disconnected from the world around them. It proved an infelicitous place to ponder the metaphysics of Mel Gibson.

Could I have pondered them better at the Nodding Dog? I think so. New Urbanists tell us about the need for semi-public spaces, where real human interaction can occur. But that space must itself be real. Organic. Authentic. You know what I mean?

I'll have a cup of the house blend. For here.

David Spence's company Good Space, Inc. restores and operates old buildings in North Oak Cliff's Bishop Arts District. Contact him through goodspace.com.