Existence interior a diminutive dwelling… purgatory or the final destination? | Short Documentary | SBS The Feed

Well, most people see tiny homes as a holiday home. This is not a holiday for me. I'm homeless. It would seemed more affordable for us to build our own tiny home than continue renting. If you go and live in that and there's a bushfire.

And it's going to catch fire and go up very quickly. With soaring rental and housing prices across the country, people are looking for cheaper alternatives. I've come to Queensland to meet two people who've been priced out of the market and have now found their own solution.

Hello, Rochelle. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Thank you very much. Oh, nice. So how big is this place? It's 2.2 meters high, 2.2 meters wide and the length is 4.2 meters. It's very compact.

You’ve gotta be good with your space management. Yeah, every surface counts. There's always extra effort that you have to do to live in a tiny house because things have got to be moved in order to make things functional. And that is the bed made. Cause I don't have a toilet here yet.

My landlady's being very gracious and given me a key so I can access the toilet facilities in there. I also pay for my share of the electricity and water. So here’s my sink and obviously I keep my dishes separate because obviously I need to wash my hands during the day so all my dirty dishes go in there.

And I just generally pop it away so you can't see it. And then that gives me extra bench space. And when I want to cook dinner, I can just put my electric stove up here. Rochelle has been living in a tiny house for nine months. She and her daughter were in a two bedroom unit.

Before the landlord sold it. She needed to stay in the same area so that her daughter's final year of high school was not interrupted by changing schools. But the prices had increased substantially. Pricing her out of the market. It was the most stressful time of my life. You know, I've got a daughter in grade 12.

I'm working full time. I was pouring everything into trying to find a home for us, and there's just nothing. At one point I said to my daughter, ‘I'm so sorry, but we're just going to have to put our energy into the tiny house.’ The purchase price was $20,000.

I bought it off Gumtree. Then I've put another $20,000 in it to renovate it because I had to completely gut it. Rochelle has parked her tiny house in her friend's backyard where she connects to their power and water. Tiny houses are caravan like houses built on wheels or trailers so they can be towed.

To different locations. They're similar in size to a shipping container. The whole house is only sixteen by eight feet. Tiny houses started in the US 30 years ago and are often promoted online as glamorous ways to downsize and live outside cities. Over the last 15 years in Australia, they've grown in popularity as weekend retreats on holiday rental sites.

This is where I had to pour all my money because I know that this rental crisis isn't going away anytime soon. I'm not going to get back into the rental market, let alone buy my own property. The rental market is bleak across the country, with just 1% of rental properties available nationally. That is the lowest rate since April 2006.

And the Brisbane market where Rochelle is living is below the national rate, with 0.7% of rental properties vacant. In terms of affordable rentals, that is rental properties that cost less than $400 a week. Brisbane is less affordable than Perth, Adelaide and Melbourne, with only 13%.

Of rental properties under $400. And the Sunshine Coast is even less affordable, with only 4.6% of rental properties under $400. Hi. Hello. Welcome. Lovely. Thank you. How long have you been living here? We have been here since mid August, so.

Yep, that's coming up to six months. Angela and her sons, Seb and Milian we’re in the same rental on the Sunshine Coast for three and a half years before it was sold. To find a place big enough for all three of them. Angela says she would have been paying more than $500, nearly double her previous rent.

A good half my wage would have gone to rent. A year ago, I'd explored the option of a tiny house but wasn't able to obtain finance at the time. So when I looked at the prices of rentals, I just thought, ‘What do I really want to be doing?’.

So I went back to that place and we made it work. Finance became available. Angela then found a landowner willing to let her set up her tiny house long term. But her local council says people who live in a tiny home need to apply for a temporary home permit. It costs $514 and lasts for 18 months.

I have decided not to get the temporary home permit, mostly because it's not a temporary home. On this property we have, I think, five dwellings that aren't council approved. A lot of tiny houses, caravans, buses do get moved along from council. We're sort of counting down the time.

Until we are also vacated from the land. It feels very uncertain our future here. It feels as though we can't put our roots down. Tiny homes are a great solution to the housing crisis. We've got people like myself buying the homes. My builder has a home.

Completed every week and you’ve got landowners that are willing to open up their land and share with people. But there's hesitancy because they're worried about repercussions with council. The Sunshine Coast Council declined an on camera interview, but instead gave us a written statement.

Town planning academic Paul Burton has been researching tiny houses for six years and says the number of people living in them permanently is growing. We reckon there's maybe a thousand or so people live permanently in tiny houses on wheels. Paul believes tiny houses are one solution to the housing crisis and wants.

Local councils to review laws around temporary dwellings. I think councils just need to be more thoughtful about how they want to regulate tiny house living. It may have been a policy that you devised some years or decades ago or other circumstances have changed.

You go, well, actually there's a housing crisis and we'd like to make some land available for somebody to come along and put a cluster of tiny houses here. Despite being an advocate for tiny houses, Paul says they have their limitations. We could make a tiny house out of wood. It’d look lovely. It’d look beautiful. But if you go and live in that in Gippsland.

And there's a bushfire, then you're sitting in something that a few sparks and it's going to catch fire and go up very quickly. What happens if it gets flooded, you know, or rain affected? This is a problem that I've had being a single mum for 16 years. It's very hard for me to enter.

Back into the real estate market. So this is something I don't see myself moving out of any time soon.

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