Canada

It's worse. Parking stalls take up extremely valuable land area that could be used to build on instead. The developers believe that they can fill a 44 unit apartment building with only 12 parking spaces, which is only 1 space for nearly every 4 units. Most parking bylaws I've seen require 1.5 parking spaces per unit, which means this building would need at least 66 spaces by law; so many that they would occupy the same land needed for the actual building that the spaces are serving. This is urban infill, but the arguments against the parking variance sound as though we're talking about a property on the edge of the city. Minimum parking requirements set an arbitrary upper limit on how many units you can build on a given parcel as they fight for every square meter.

Yup. Welcome to the regulation problem that developers complain about. You can physically build all kinds of things, but it can get really hard legally to build anything that's not a mcmansion.

Usually it's death by a thousand cuts like this. Sometimes there's one big factor too, like Vancouver's 100k/unit utility hookup fee.