Most people driving by the Wheatland Plaza Shopping Center in Duncanville, Texas, would see nothing out of the ordinary: a shopping strip mall with about a dozen shops and 80 parking spaces. But when Monte Anderson, the incremental real estate developer leading Options Real Estate, considered the same strip mall four years ago, he saw something else: not just the potential to revitalize the shopping center but the opportunity to turn some of the parking lot into housing. 

This summer, Anderson, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, will break ground on a 16-unit townhouse development that will turn one-half acre of parking space into a chance at home ownership for families making less than 80% of the area’s median income. The properties will provide not just an opportunity to own a home for residents, but also a chance to save money on car ownership by locating them in a more central part of the city with better access to shops, amenities and jobs.   

In a country oversaturated by parking, development projects like these are a clear, creative and common sense solution to the problem of decreasing municipal fiscal productivity, the blight of underutilized parking lots, and the current housing shortage afflicting the nation. It’s not easy to move forward with these kinds of projects, but Anderson’s tale shows that it is possible with patience, perseverance, and the right partnerships. 

The Cost of Excess Asphalt

The United States currently facilitates the storage of about 200 million cars on somewhere between 700 million and 2 billion parking spaces nationwide, an allocation of land that the late parking expert Donald Shoup estimated cost the U.S. between $102-374 billion annually, about $221-652 billion in today’s dollars. In our analysis of parking-related land use in over 100 cities, we found that a median of 26% of the land in more than 100 city centers is reserved for parking, with some cities reserving well over 30% for car storage.  

The overabundance of parking lots creates blight, especially in downtowns, and perpetuates a culture of driving by sustaining the expectation that parking will always be abundantly available and free. It also keeps cities locked in patterns of fiscal unsustainability, at a time when more and more cities face fiscal difficulties due to growing maintenance costs and decreased transfers of federal dollars. Land reserved for parking generates very little tax revenue for cities, especially when compared to more productive alternative uses such as commercial and residential development.  

“Municipal leaders need to recognize that they have a choice to make,” said Daniel Herriges, Policy Director at PRN. “Either you can work to support productive redevelopment of these vast, paved-over areas. Or you can settle for abundant parking at the cost of local vitality.”

Upholding status quo parking levels, through regulations that perpetuate an oversupply, will only lead to more traffic, higher infrastructure costs, increased pollution and lost opportunity. But even where government does not stand in the way, responding to an excess of parking with more productive development takes innovative thinking, local leadership and a collaborative mindset, all of which are staples in Anderson’s toolkit. 

The Incremental Developer’s Answer

Growing up in a low-income neighborhood, Monte watched his neighborhood decline in response to white flight. His father refused to move after integration became law, and Monte watched in shock as his friends moved away seemingly overnight. As the neighborhood began to decline, Monte realized that, “no one was coming to save us.” So, despite no formal training, he decided to put his own ideas into action, slowly building his skills and capacity as an incremental developer. “I turned that traumatic experience into my life mission to work in my neighborhood, to make it better, no matter who came there,”  he said. 

Since then, he’s gone on to develop various residential and commercial projects, all of which exhibit, to some degree, Monte’s basic philosophy towards development:

First, work in your own backyard. Perhaps imitating his father’s resolve all those years earlier, Monte teaches incremental developers to “find your farm”—commit to one community for the long haul.

Second, embrace the value of small projects. They allow for experimentation, gradual improvements and quick pivots in the face of new information or unexpected changes. They also make it easier to help folks on the margin by keeping costs down.

Third: embrace partnerships. Without them, many projects, including Monte’s Wheatland housing addition, wouldn’t happen.  

Wheatland Plaza is one of Anderson’s most recent projects and the second to demonstrate the transformation of a parking lot into housing. He bought the strip in 2022, after several failed attempts to buy it in years past. Its out-of-town landlords called him desperate to get it off their hands after years of deferred maintenance disqualified them for insurance. With its proximity to a school, park, and government offices, Anderson saw it as a chance to create a new Main Street-style development. A conversation with a friend working at Habitat created a viable partnership: Anderson would take on the infrastructure while Habitat would build the homes. 

Applying his long-term farm mentality, Anderson saw the addition of housing less as a means to quickly increase his own profit margin and more as a vehicle for improving the overall value, appeal and productivity of the shopping center and neighborhood as a whole. He recognized that adding housing would improve the value of the businesses around it. This would generate more transactions for business owners, more revenue for property owners, and increased tax revenue for the city, all while making it a more pleasant place for the community at large. In the short term, an investment, but in the long run, a win-win all around. 

But achieving this meant Anderson was signing up for years of conversation and dialogue with the community, both with local leaders and with neighbors. Persuading local leaders to approve the needed rezoning meant helping them see the multi-layered value in such a development.  

From a fiscal perspective, it was a straightforward and commonsense argument: adding residential would increase the economic productivity of the lot, which would benefit the city through increased tax revenues. Socially, reusing parking for more dynamic, productive uses would add dynamism and activity to otherwise dead slabs of cement, while enabling people to live closer to jobs and forgo the expensive ownership of a car (or a second car) if they desire. 

To foster buy-in, Anderson invested hours sharing his vision with city leaders, residents, board and commission members and asking them plainly if they wanted it: he wasn’t going to fight them if they didn’t. Desperate to improve the blighted shopping center, most stakeholders responded favorably to Anderson’s idea, although there was concern about the implications of having less parking. “You have to convince them that you’re not going to have a parking nightmare,” Anderson said. 

Such anxieties are often rooted in experiences from time past when the general pattern of patronage involved all customers visiting at the same time: after school and evenings. In such a context, cities and developers operated off the belief that the right amount of parking to supply at any time was that which would be adequate to handle crowds on the busiest days. That approach became standard practice. 

But things have changed, and shopping centers including Wheatland Plaza have evolved to hold the kinds of businesses that attract customers all day, at different times of each day. Anderson used this data and observations to help the community see how “busiest day capacity” was no longer needed around the clock. The same available parking spaces could be used at different times of the day by different patrons. 

 From Asphalt to Opportunity

In the near future, the kind of rezoning process Monte Anderson went through might become less time-consuming in some larger Texas cities, thanks to Senate Bill 840. Approved by the House in May 2025 and, as of this writing, expected to be signed by the governor, the bill would allow property owners (in cities over 150,000) to build mixed-use and multifamily housing by-right on land they own in commercial and retail districts. Reforming the zoning process in this way could save incremental developers like Anderson months if not years of time spent on negotiating rezonings, thereby making retrofit projects like his more feasible.  

In the meantime, taking on a project like this requires patience because the approach runs against the development industry’s status quo. But, Anderson insists, it does not run against historic precedent. “My projects are not odd; they make sense,” he said, pointing to the fact that incremental building was the common approach a century ago and to the inherently less-risky nature of this approach. “Small projects mean smaller mistakes, less cataclysmic changes and allow me to better adjust for the market,” he explained. 

But it also allows him to help people who otherwise might not be able to break into home or business-ownership. For example, on the commercial side, he’s able to lease his smaller business spaces to aspiring entrepreneurs who might not have the best credit. “I can take a chance on them,” he said. Even if it doesn’t work out, the space is small enough and demand high enough that he can easily move someone else in with ease. Such arrangements make it much easier for small business owners to get going because Anderson is able to secure loans with longer amortization periods, keeping his costs low and saving entrepreneurs from the high cost of much shorter amortization periods. 

His approach also allows him to provide holistic support to his commercial tenants. For example, when Kertrina Dauway decided to open her new Sea Moss business inside Anderson’s DeSoto Marketplace, her lease came with access to business coaching, a service that helped her better understand how to manage aspects of her business such as setting up payroll and choosing the right tax entity. Being new to retail, she started off in a small space, gradually growing into larger ones as she learned the ropes of running a retail operation. 

Back to housing. When they open, the 16 condos will provide not just homes for tenants but an example for small-scale developers who see similar potential in their towns. To such aspiring developers, Anderson offers a warning: these kinds of adaptive reuse projects are not easy. Coordinating with other property owners adjacent to the parking lot and securing the necessary platting, infrastructure, financing and approvals are tasks for only the most persistent. But with the right partnerships and with city leadership willing to collaborate and see the adaptive reuse as a long-term investment in its own financial future, it just might be possible. 

“They say it takes a village to raise a child,” Monte said. “I say it takes a whole community to do a project like this.”