Aerial image of site for proposed development of 120 seniors dwellings in Nutleys Creek Road, Bermagui. Photo: Bega Valley Shire Council website.
Some academics view residential parks as filling a critical gap in the housing market amid a chronic shortage of affordable housing.
Residential parks, also known as manufactured housing estates and land lease developments, have existed in the Far South Coast for some time. Examples include Easts Village in Narooma, and Merimbula Lake Village and Acacia Ponds near Merimbula. Recent proposals for seniors developments in Narooma and Bermagui have sparked community concern, as have proposals to convert caravan parks at Merimbula Lake and Kalaru into permanent dwelling sites for caravans and moveable dwellings.
In the second of two articles examining the trend, this post examines the positive aspects of residential parks.
University of Canberra’s Professor Raechel Johns has studied why growing numbers of people are moving to residential parks. She said there was evidence that amid the high cost of housing there was a lot of demand among older people for these more affordable dwellings.
“People are making a lifestyle choice to live in a holiday park which will downsize their expenses and home and give them a community, so it is an alternative to retirement villages, and they are cheaper in many cases,” Dr Johns said.
For decades, Dr David Bunce from Flinders University has been studying housing options such as residential parks in Australia, the US and UK.
He agrees that retirees are ideal residents for residential parks because they have something in common, mutual reciprocity by looking out for each other, and singles, particularly females, enjoy “safety in numbers”. Residents on the aged pension may be eligible for rental assistance. Residential parks could also suit seasonal workers.
Dr Bunce does not recommend them for the unemployed or people with complex needs as residential parks are usually some distance from the services and social contacts they need. For young families, residential parks are better than being homeless or couch surfing, “but you are still away from schools and services and often on marginal land, so they are not really suitable for people who don’t have a car and usually there is very little public transport”.
Merimbula Lake Holiday Park will remove its 54 short-term and camping sites and add 110 long-term sites. Photo: Merimbula Lake Holiday Park Facebook.
He said the park operator’s attitude and people management skills would determine if the park was a happy community or not. Generally, though, the research showed that people had a good experience living in residential parks.
Dr Bunce said two of the biggest contributors to the housing crisis were underinvestment in public housing and escalating land values. “Traditionally the price of land was one third of the cost of building the house,” he said. “Now the land is twice the cost of building the house.”
At the same time, houses had got larger with home offices, home theatres, multiple bathrooms and double garages while families had become smaller.
As a result, “there are probably a lot of people who will never be able to afford to buy their own home, so tiny homes, modular homes and prefabricated ones are a good solution”.
Conventional bricks-and-mortar homes are slow to build due to the time it takes to get regulatory approvals, and shortages of tradespeople and building materials. However, houses built in factories are much quicker to build. Combined with a streamlined approval process, prefabricated houses could release housing stock into the market far more quickly.
“I believe that governments, local authorities and banks have to look at doing things differently,” Dr Bunce said. “Because of the wait and high prices for bricks and mortar homes, people won’t get into the housing market, especially young singles and divorcees re-entering homeownership.”
Dr Bunce has written a paper about how residential parks could be ideal sites for tiny homes.
Residential parks could be ideal sites for tiny homes. Photo: File.
The major problem he sees with residential parks is that residents have no assurance how long they can live there.
“I think there is a place for residential parks as long as they can offer some kind of certainty of tenure, but they are poorly regulated,” he said.
While retirement villages are well regulated and the Retirement Village Act gives residents lifetime licence to occupy the land and house, there is much less regulation around residential parks. Dr Bunce said this could be remedied by making approval conditional on offering long-term leases, such as 20 years.
“Governments have underinvested in housing for three decades and now it is coming back to bite them,” Dr Bunce said. “Regulations and the industry have to catch up with the reality that things like tiny homes and residential parks, including manufactured home estates, are the only option for many people.”
