Caravan park owners say they are copping the brunt of the housing crisis, as those on the brink of homelessness turn to these facilities as a last resort.<\/p>\n
Owners have spoken to the ABC about the emotional toll of turning desperate people away and dealing with anti-social behaviour from some long-term residents.<\/p>\n
Greg Homer has run the Waterloo Village Caravan Park on the outskirts of Bunbury, 160km south of Perth, with his family since 2011.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Greg Homer says turning away desperate people every day is taking a toll on him and his staff.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
Mr Homer said, while he found running the park fulfilling, the demand for accommodation he faced on a daily basis was overwhelming.<\/p>\n
“Our phone does not stop ringing every single day,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had people in tears at our front counter, people who come back multiple times a day.”<\/p>\n
Parks of last resort<\/p>\n
Mr Homer’s experience is indicative of the seismic shift in caravan park culture, brought on by an acute shortage of homes.<\/p>\n
He said he was increasingly turning away locals pleading for any kind of accommodation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Greg Homer wishes he had more room to help people find a place to live.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
“They’ll be a family with a couple of small kids and asking if they just set up a tent anywhere on our property just to live, just to have something, so they are not sleeping in a car, so they can actually accommodate their kids,” Mr Homer said.<\/p>\n
“It’s very, very tough to face that.”<\/p>\n
Mr Homer said he understood why caravan parks were such a popular choice for people struggling financially.<\/p>\n
“We tend to be the most affordable of all styles of accommodation \u2026 so we’ve seen more and more people who are interested,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I’ve had a vacancy at the caravan park now for probably four to five months.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Greg Homer says the number of people being turned away is sometimes emotionally overwhelming.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
Kylie Holt has been living in a converted 1967 Leyland Leopard school bus for five years with her young family on long-term sites in the South West.<\/p>\n
“We’re all reliant on having somewhere to call home, no matter how humble that becomes, and just trying to provide that stability for yourself and your family,” Mrs Holt said.<\/p>\n
Kylie Holt says she is not confident she would find another caravan park with vacancies if she was forced to start looking now.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
She said she had seen a significant increase in the number of people using caravan parks as long-term accommodation.<\/p>\n
“I’d say where we are, the amount of permanent families and people that we had doubled in the last three years,” she said.<\/p>\n
“From young mums with children, older men who have come out of divorce or widowed, and they can’t afford a mortgage on their pension \u2014 a lot of different scenarios.”<\/p>\n
Tourism operator to landlord<\/p>\n
The South West experienced a 62.9 per cent increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness between 2016 and 2021, which was the second largest increase in the state, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.<\/p>\n
South West caravan park manager Angela Kaitsioukas said she struggled with the shift from short-term holiday makers to long-term accommodation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Waterloo Village Caravan Park offers alternative types of long-term accommodation for people who do not have a caravan of their own.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
Ms Kaitsioukas said anti-social behaviour was causing safety concerns for her staff.<\/p>\n
“There have been a couple of times where I have been quite scared to the point that now we actually have a pepper spray in our top drawer in the office,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We need everyone [customers] to have a current police clearance, no older than, like, six months old.<\/p>\n
“We had been actually given a lot of false police clearances \u2026 I didn’t realise that people would actually go to that length.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Angela Kaitsioukas says more anti-social behaviour is making work challenging.\u00a0 (ABC South West: Madigan Landry)<\/p>\n
Ms Kaitsioukas said she was considering removing long-term residency as an option because of the stress.<\/p>\n
“I’m not sure that we will continue on doing it just because each year it seems to be getting a lot worse,” she said.<\/p>\n
“We do want to be, ultimately, just a caravan park.”‘An emergency valve’<\/p>\n
Anglicare CEO Mark Glasson said even caravan park space had been exhausted by the prolonged housing shortage.<\/p>\n
“The inaccessibility of caravan parks for many people means that they are sleeping rough, they’re sleeping in their cars, in tents, in people’s backyards,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s also a worrying trend that what was once an emergency valve is no longer available.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Caravan park owners say they are copping the brunt of the housing crisis, as those on the brink…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[132350,64,63,183986,99,183985,78246,7694,10920,57415,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-328157","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-anti-social-behaviour","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-bunbury-homelessness","12":"tag-business","13":"tag-caravan-culture","14":"tag-caravan-park","15":"tag-homelessness","16":"tag-housing-crisis","17":"tag-landlord","18":"tag-wa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}