Housing affordability is one of Australia’s defining policy challenges, and getting more homes built is central to fixing it. Yet state and local governments force developers to build a fixed number of off-street car-parking spaces with every new home, adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each home.
This makes otherwise viable developments uneconomic and means homes that would have been built simply aren’t.
Grattan’s May 2026 report, Wasted space: Axe car-parking rules to ease the housing crisis, recommended these rules be scrapped. In this presentation to the Australian Conference of Economists, Grattan’s Ashleigh Chang sets out the analysis behind that case: quantifying, for Melbourne and Sydney, the mismatch between what apartment buyers will pay for an off-street parking space and what it costs to build. Across most of both cities the gap is wide – wide enough that removing parking mandates could tip an additional 140,000 dwellings in the two cities into commercial feasibility.