A trend towards urban living has disproportionately put a strain on the UK's town and city local authorities to allocate sites for residential development – typically in areas where land is unavailable. Could car parks represent a solution?
Investment management firm, JLL, has identified just under 10,500 car parks in the UK's towns and cities with the possibility to comfortably accommodate up to 400,000 homes, enough to house circa one million people.
What's more, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to build without the loss of parking spaces.
Environmental-led policy is increasingly seeking to reduce the number of cars in urban areas steering people to alternatives such as public transport or park-and-ride options. Meanwhile the on-set of driver-less vehicles has raised questions over whether there will be a dramatic reduction in human-operated cars altogether.
An OECD study that has modelled the projected use of self-driving cars has predicted that the number of privately owned cars needed worldwide could reduce by 80% to 90% over the coming decades. If car ownership declines, could space that is currently devoted to parking become available for other uses?
Rapid population changes
The need for new urban residential development sites in the UK has increased significantly in the past two decades. Between the end of the Second World War in 1945 and the year 2000, the UK population increased steadily from 50m to 59m, equating to around 160,000 additional people per year.
Since 2000 the growth has ballooned to around 400,000 additional people per year with the population now standing at 65m. The UK population is forecast to grow at a similar rate over the next 15 years to around 71m by 2030.
The growth comes on the back of an extended period of net inward migration to the UK, as well as a dramatic increase in the average life expectancy of a UK citizen creating a rapidly aging population. Currently 15% of the population is aged 65-plus, a figure set to rise to 25% by 2030.
Meanwhile over the past two decades a trend towards urbanisation has seen rapid population growth in many of the UK's city centres. This has been driven by young professionals, students and recent graduates choosing to live close to employment hubs and cultural and entertainment quarters.
Insufficient housing
To accommodate these significant demographic changes, successive UK Governments have set national housebuilding targets – the current target stands at 240,000 new homes per annum. However, on average the UK builds circa 150,000 homes per annum, just a little over half of what is needed. In fact, a House of Lords report from July 2016 now puts the requirement up to 300,000 homes per annum, so, it is potentially even worse than previously thought, at a time when market factors will invariably make it more challenging to meet such a target.
