The rules that require new housing developments to include off-street parking needlessly drive up the price of homes and should be scrapped, according to a new Grattan Institute report.
The report, Wasted space: Axe car-parking rules to ease the housing crisis, finds that the rules add about $70,000 to the cost of building a typical two-bedroom apartment in Sydney, $62,000 in Melbourne, $113,000 in Brisbane, $95,000 in Adelaide, and $137,000 in Perth.
'Many people who live in apartments don't want or need car-parking, but they are forced to pay for it anyway,' says Grattan Institute CEO Aruna Sathanapally.
There are more car spaces than cars in apartment blocks in Sydney and Melbourne. Off-street parking accounts for 13 per cent of the built floor space of apartments in those two cities. And as much as 40 per cent of these spaces sit vacant each night.
About 40 per cent of households in studio or one-bedroom apartments, and 19 per cent of households in two-bedroom apartments, don't own a car. And 58 per cent of households in family-sized apartments with three or more bedrooms have just one car, or none.
'The result is a wasteful mismatch across our major cities between what parking is mandated and what's needed,' says Dr Sathanapally.
Every year, Australia spends more than $1 billion building unwanted off-street parking.
The report calls on state governments and local councils to remove parking requirements for new housing developments.
Homebuilders would still be free to provide the spaces that residents want, but would no longer have to build parking that residents don't want.
As well as cutting tens of thousands of dollars off the cost of new homes, this change would shave months off construction time and could tip an additional 140,000 dwellings in Sydney and Melbourne into commercial feasibility - homes that currently don't stack up financially because of parking costs.
It would avoid the cost of constructing more than 86,000 unwanted car spaces nationwide over the next five years - spaces that would otherwise consume $5.2 billion in construction resources that could instead go toward building 9,000 extra homes.
Parking requirements are intended to stop cars from new developments clogging up residential streets - but they are a blunt, second-best tool. State and local governments should instead better manage demand for on-street parking in high-demand areas, via parking permits, time limits, and user charging.
'Letting Australian homebuyers choose the car-parking they need will make housing cheaper, get more homes built faster, and create more walkable, cleaner, and better-designed cities,' says Dr Sathanapally.
'What are we waiting for?'
