Belmont Hotel owner Monte Anderson has a plan to create 500-square-foot retail spaces in the Smoke parking lot.

It’s an example of what he calls the “suburban parking lot repair.”

Consider an old suburban K-mart. There’s not much you can do about the big box, although they can be reused. Anderson once sold one to a tortilla factory. But what about the rest of that vast parking lot?

Anderson, founding president of the Congress of New Urbanism North Texas chapter, suggests creating something to address the street. Take a bit of that chasm of unused parking and use it not for the next Jack-in-the-Box franchise but for the type of development that engages community.

He’s putting his money where his mouth is with a small retail development at his real estate masterpiece, the Belmont Hotel.

The plan calls for two 500-square-foot and one 1,200-square-foot retail spaces facing Fort Worth Avenue and backing up to the Smoke parking lot. The idea is to create a more defined connection between the Metro Paws vet and Manny Rodriguez’s photography studio to Smoke and the hotel.

He would like for the spaces to contain useful services — he mentions a mail center and a shoe-repair place. He says he intends only one of them to be food related.

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