Australia is wasting more than $1 billion each year building off-street car parks that end up sitting unused and unwanted, a Grattan Institute report has found.<\/p>\n
The report, released tonight, recommends scrapping rules that force developers to include a minimum number of car park spaces when building housing.<\/p>\n
The “Wasted Space” report found that upwards of 40 per cent of car parks were left empty each night in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane apartments.<\/p>\n
“State and local governments typically require new housing to include off-street parking \u2014 often much more than residents want, needlessly driving up the price of housing,” the report said.<\/p>\n
“There are more car spaces in apartments in Sydney and Melbourne than cars.”<\/p>\n
The report found these parking minimums increased construction costs by $70,000 for a two-bedroom Sydney apartment.<\/p>\n
Parking minimums add $62,000 to the price tag of a two-bedroom Melbourne apartment, $113,000 to one in Brisbane, $137,000 in Perth, and $95,000 in Adelaide.<\/p>\n
The report found developers rarely built more car parks than they were legally obligated to do, since it was seldom worth the additional expense.<\/p>\n
What can be done about it?<\/p>\n
The authors recommend “unbundling” car parking spaces so that they can be bought or rented separately from a unit.<\/p>\n
They argue this would prevent apartment dwellers from paying for a car park that they never end up using.<\/p>\n
The report found 19 per cent of two-bedroom apartment households in Australia’s capital cities did not own a car.<\/p>\n
That number rises to 40 per cent for those living in one-bedroom and studio apartments in the capital cities.<\/p>\n
What about on-street parking?<\/p>\n
Parking minimums are put in place to prevent apartment owners from parking on the street, taking up valuable spaces.<\/p>\n
The authors argue these “don’t work”, instead saying councils should create residential parking permit schemes in areas where spaces are scarce.<\/p>\n
These schemes place time limits on parking, while providing residents with an exemption permit \u2014 typically for a fee, depending on how in-demand it is.<\/p>\n
What if we did away with it?<\/p>\n
Several councils have decreased their parking minimum requirements over the years, but the authors say they should be abolished altogether.<\/p>\n
They estimate this would result in 86,000 fewer car parking spaces being built in the next five years, resulting in a $5.2 billion saving.<\/p>\n
Their modelling suggests scrapping these laws would result in 140,000 more dwellings being tipped into the point of commercial viability across Sydney and Melbourne alone.<\/p>\n
They say this would reduce car dependency in the cities, create more high-density homes, and drive down costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia is wasting more than $1 billion each year building off-street car parks that end up sitting unused…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,651,11795,647,44,328287,46,670],"class_list":["post-680746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-brisbane","tag-grattan-institute","tag-melbourne","tag-news","tag-parking-minimums","tag-perth","tag-sydney"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}