The caravan park: Australia’s affordable home
An accommodation crisis in Tasmania is pushing people into van parks
Steve Ward had a good idea. Why not create an affordable housing development designed according to permaculture principles and modelled on the caravan park? Excellent, I thought, as he told me how the place could be edibly landscaped.
That was back in the eighties when we had AASC, the Australian Association of Sustainable Communities. At the time the interest in rural resettlement on multiple occupancy properties, enabled by the NSW Multiple Occupancy Act, was still current. It carried over from the previous decade during which many of Australia’s intentional communities were founded.
Steve’s idea came to mind while staying for a time in a beachside van park in south-east Tasmania. It was stimulated by the work of the gardener who maintained a productive, mixed vegetable garden/orchard for the benefit of those staying in the campground. Walk into the camp kitchen and there would be a big container of freshly-harvested silverbeet. In a container garden outside the kitchen door was a garden of culinary herbs.
The most suitable accommodation
We’ve been on the road since the start of last winter, up and down the East Coast and into the rainforests and duststorms of the Great Dividing Range. Time spent in a northern NSW town brought us the dubiuous opportunity to breath the thick smoke of the bushfires surrounding the town. The fires followed us down the coast, through East Gippsland and over to Tasmania.
Freecamps offered minimal facilities but we learned to appreciate staying in commercial caravan parks because they have hot showers and washing machines. Other than hot water and clean clothes, another advantage of living in a van park is meeting people we wouldn’t otherwise get to talk to, people with ideas, attitudes and life experiences different to ours. While staying in a coastal van park in south-east Tasmania, among them I found several for whom the van park is home for an indefinite time.
Let’s be clear that when it comes to living in van parks, other than short-term transient tourists and travellers, there are two types: those who prefer living in van parks and those who do not.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ census disclosed van parks to be the preferred home of thousands. For them, the minimalism of a caravan and annexe are preferable to a fixed home with its utility costs, rent or mortgage, maintenance, lawn mowing, rates and other expenses and a backyard to look after.
For others the van parks are the only accommodation they can afford. I met some of those people where we are staying:
- an older man and his teenage daughter; he lives on a pension; they occupy a small car camping tent just big enough to stand up in; his daughter goes to school online, five hours a day, five days a week
- a middle aged single woman living longer-term in her small caravan and annex; she plans to buy or build a home at some time
- a single woman living in a camper trailer
- a younger couple living in their car camping tent; the man studies and the woman works
- a woman and three children, two of them in their early teens, living in a small caravan; her husband is working in the mines in WA
- a family living in a large car camping tent; the man works in the area; they have been living here for some time
- a family with a young child living in their camping trailer; the man was working in the area; when his job ended, the van park manager offered the woman work as a cleaner after the previous cleaner injured herself; come March this year, they plan to continue their life on the road, first in Tasmanian then on the Australian mainland; theirs is a voluntary life on the road.
Why do some with one partner working live in van parks rather than rent a house or apartment? The answer: rental accommodation is in short supply and rents are expensive in the Hobart area. Van parks are the most practical accommodation for people working on a fixed-term contract or other arrangement.
The van park where these people are living is to close in April this year to make way for a housing subdivision. Where do they people go? The family with a young child are to head over to the mainland and continue their life on the road. The older man and his teenage daughter do not know where they will go. Most van parks cater to travellers and allow only limited stays. He is talking about free camping somewhere, though where he has no idea at present although he is optimistic he will find somerthing. Finding somewhere long term will be the challenge for others too.
A crisis in accommodation
The man and his daughter have been searching for a rental property. After eight months renting in a nearby town they were given a week’s notice to vacate. The only affordable option was the van park. One of the women living here confirmed the high cost of renting in Hobart. Her daughter recently received notice that her family’s rent is being increased by $70 a week.
It is no secret that Hobart faces a significant housing crisis. A shortfall of 3000 to 5000 social housing dwellings is reported by housing agencies. Earlier this year the large number of people camping in tents and vehicles at the Hobart Showgrounds highlighted the crisis.
Renting is not the only housing problem the city faces. There is also shortage of homes for sale and, like renting, high demand is forcing up prices. Comments on the Moving To Tasmania facebook group confirm significant price increases, as do real estate ads.
Prices drive people out of the Hobart market to small towns to the south and east from where they commute to work in the city. This is driving up housing prices in what were coastal holiday towns. An asking price of close to $600,000 for a small, vertical board cottage built in 1948 in Dodges Ferry, a 40km drive east of Hobart, and in need of repair, confirmed that. No doubt it’s proximity to the water had much to do with the price even though water views were not that great. That is expensive for this town, however it is typical of the scale of price rises over the last two years. The seller of a property further along the street raised the asking price by $15,000 above a figure already quoted when a potential buyer showed interest, even though the house has been on the market for four months. That’s a long time in the present houses-for-sale shortfall. Any place on the market that long is sure to be overpriced or tacky. That one was both. A woman who works in banking told my partner and that house prices in the coastal region around half-an-hour drive east of Hobart increased by 24 percent in the last year. They show no sign of abating.
According to a real estate agent, properties in the $300,000-$380,000 are hotly contested by young, first home buyers. I saw that first hand when we checked out a house in beachside Carlton. We didn’t intend to buy. We were just curious about what buyers got for their money. In the first 15 minutes after the start of the open house inspection, I counted around 50 people checking it out. Others would have come later. As the agent said, they appeared to be first home buyers. The house sold then and there, around $40,000 in excess of the asking price of $380,000.
Immigration from the mainland is another cause of high rental and house prices and their shortage. People come here for a less-stressful life even though salaries and wages are the lowest in the country. Others come to retire or to be with family. With the 2019–2020 spring and summer bushfire emergency on the mainland, a woman asked me if I was another climate refugee.
Exacerbating the hosing shortfall are properties withdrawn from the rental market to capitalise on AirBnB.
Alternative accommodation options not always viable
David Holmgren’s book, Retrosuburbia, has some good and tried ideas for accommodation. Many of us might have lived in some of the arrangements he describes, like sharehousing and housing cooperatives.
They are part of the solution, however they are not for all and moving into cooperative housing brings its own challenges, such as getting on with people who have different attitudes and expectations, and adapting to a very different way of living. Finding co-operative housing is another challenge. It does not exist in many places.
There are precedents for what David proposes. Selli Hoo is an owner-occupied sharehouse in Adelaide, South Australia, that traces its origin back to the 1970s. Residents have their own room, and shared kitchen and living area, vege garden and fruit trees, workshop and a pen of chooks. They use bicycles or public transport to get around instead of cars.
Another model, no longer in existence, was the Institute for Cultural Affair’s tree-level, 1960s walkup apartment block in inner-urban Marrickville in Sydney’s Inner West. Members occupied the apartments, one of which was set aside as community space and office. Think of it as a vertical community.
Co-housing an option?
Given the reality I describe, Steve Ward’s idea of a permaculture-designed development based on the traditional Australian caravan park as affordable accommodation looks attractive. Imagine an estate of cabins, tiny houses and caravans amid an edible landscape with a community centre, community solar farm, water management system and more. Were there interest, the right skills and a co-working space set up, perhaps worker co-operatives could be established to provide livelihoods.
It’s a great idea. Where would we build it? Here we meet the tyranny of land prices and the challenge of raising capital. Co-ops of any kind, including rural ecovillage developments and land trusts, need start-up capital to buy land and build infrastructure. People moving into cooperative housing would need capital to join and build. Perhaps raising capital is something the social investment industry (also known as ‘ethical investment’) could look into.
There are precedents in the form of urban co-housing that have existed for decades. Even there, entry prices have risen. A few years before Hobart prices reached their present level, a home in Hobart’s Cascade Co-housing, Australia’s first co-housing project, was selling for well above the market average. The sellers eventually reduced their asking price. Despite the advantages co-housing offers, it was not affordable housing. Like other forms of cooperative housing, cohousing developments are few.
Why not look for affordable housing in rural areas rather than the city? Land and house prices there are usually cheaper. The answer is simple. Unless people have the capital to buy into a cooperative development or buy a private home, most are reliant on city work to service their mortgage.
Housing affordability is the conundrum of modern times. It is complicated by the spread of the contingent economy of part time, casual and short term contract work in an environment of high rental prices. That creates financial uncertainty and is one of the reasons many young people will never become home owners. It is also why David Holmgren, in discussing Retrosuburbia, described those likely to adopt the book’s ideas as people not financially or otherwise struggling, as an elite.
That won’t help the people in the van park. Their challenge is not retrofitting a home for food production, energy and water efficiency. It is making do with their present lack of housing security and meeting their daily needs in Australia’s new affordable accommodation: the caravan park.
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