Singapore MP Proposes Converting HDB Car Parks Into Pickleball Courts

Pickleball's space problem in Singapore just got a hearing at the highest level. Sengkang GRC MP Jamus Lim stood in Parliament on March 5 and made the case for converting chronically under-utilised upper floors of HDB multi-storey car parks into pickleball courts, putting the sport's infrastructure crunch squarely on the legislative agenda.

The logic is hard to argue with. Singapore's HDB multi-storey car parks are a known planning headache: upper floors sit largely empty as ground-level parking meets most daily demand, leaving thousands of square metres of covered, load-bearing concrete doing nothing. A standard pickleball court measures 6.1 by 13.4 metres, meaning a single MSCP floor could accommodate multiple courts with room to spare. Lim's proposal essentially asks why a sport struggling to find space and a structure struggling to find purpose can't solve each other's problems.

The timing reflects just how fast pickleball has grown in Singapore. What began as a niche recreational sport has expanded rapidly enough to generate genuine court scarcity, with players competing for slots at existing facilities and clubs reporting waitlists for court time. That kind of demand pressure is exactly what gets politicians paying attention, and Lim's March 5 proposal signals the sport has moved past the hobbyist phase into something the government needs to actively plan around.

The MSCP conversion idea isn't entirely without precedent in Singapore's approach to space constraints. The city-state has a long track record of stacking uses vertically and repurposing infrastructure when demographics shift. Car ownership among younger Singaporeans has been declining, which means the under-utilisation problem on those upper floors is structural, not temporary. If anything, it's likely to deepen.

Whether the proposal advances into policy will depend on responses from the Housing Development Board and relevant sports agencies. But Lim putting the question to Parliament is itself a marker: pickleball in Singapore is no longer just a grassroots story. It's a resource allocation debate happening in the chamber where decisions get made.