Tiny homes are often seen as a great way to relieve the housing crisis particularly in regional areas, but they often run up against planning problems. The owner of a tiny home in Northern NSW was recently told by the local council to demolish the dwelling because it didn't comply with regulations.
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00:00 I wouldn't say it's very common. It certainly does happen. And I think in this case, and
00:07 there was another case reported on recently from the Sunshine Coast, what triggers it
00:12 is typically complaints from a neighbour, which I think is an interesting little side
00:17 issue to consider. So it's perhaps not as common as we might think, but it will probably
00:22 grow as more people embrace tiny house living as either just their preference for housing
00:31 or in response or both to the current housing crisis. So it's probably not going away. So
00:38 we do need, and councils are starting to review their policies. I'm a bit sceptical about
00:45 whether we'll get a nationally consistent definition or approach to policymaking because
00:51 we struggle to do that on so many fronts. And I doubt if this will be an exception,
00:55 unfortunately. So the planning permission rules change depending
00:59 which state, where you are in the country, basically, do they?
01:02 Absolutely. They vary from state and territory, but also from local council to local council.
01:08 So I mean, in Queensland, where I am, each council has to produce a planning scheme that
01:13 will say something about this. They probably also pass local laws that regulate something
01:20 like the tiny house on wheels that will be treated like a caravan. So it won't necessarily
01:26 be a planning policy that gets you if you've got a caravan that you want to live in or
01:31 you want somebody to live in, but it'll be a local bylaw that says you can have a caravan
01:36 on your property, park it on your property. It's just a vehicle, but you can't live in
01:41 it. Nobody can live in it for more than a certain period of time, often about 30 days.
01:46 So it's not a permanent solution to a housing problem.
01:50 What are the most common council objections to tiny homes, Simple?
01:55 Well, often that they are people want to put them in places that aren't really fit to have
02:01 them. I mean, I think it's interesting that the Byron case and the Sunshine Coast case
02:08 were probably not. They were not within towns or cities. They were out in the countryside
02:15 on large, multi hectare lots. If you're trying to do this in a suburb and you're on anything
02:26 less than a quarter of an acre, then you probably haven't got much room to put a secondary dwelling,
02:34 which is what planners call tiny houses or granny flats, the permanent ones. You won't
02:40 have a lot of room to do that if you've got to set it back a metre from the boundary.
02:44 It can't connect to the main house and so on. So if people are trying to squeeze something
02:50 into a very small lot, then that will be a problem. You've also got to think about how
02:56 they connect to infrastructure. So getting power is not necessarily a big deal. I mean,
03:02 you can go off grid quite easily now with your photovoltaics, but it's what you do with
03:06 your wastewater and how it might impact on stormwater that councils will be concerned
03:13 about because you don't want that to, you don't want to be discharging wastewater just
03:18 across the fence onto your neighbour's property or diverting stormwater onto your neighbour's
03:22 property. So those are the kind of things that planners will typically concern themselves
03:26 with and rightly so. But you said that councils, planners are now
03:30 just starting to change how they handle these small homes. Paul, is that right? How quickly
03:37 is that process happening? Oh, as quickly as any reviews of planning
03:42 schemes take place, which is, you know, typically it takes a few years to get amendments through
03:49 the system. I think we may be seeing things happening at a slightly faster pace simply
03:56 because of the increasing recognition that we are in the middle of a very serious housing
04:02 crisis that is affecting more and more people. And we're aware that it's not a temporary
04:10 blip. It's not going to go away. It won't be over by Christmas or anything like that.
04:13 So that's forcing councils to reassess not just their attitude to tiny houses, but to
04:20 a whole host of planning issues that affect housing supply. And what we really need and
04:27 what tiny houses contribute is they contribute to a greater variety. At the moment, we're,
04:32 and for decades, we've been a bit polarised. You know, we're good at knocking out three,
04:36 four bedroom detached houses in outer suburban areas. And we're pretty good at putting up,
04:42 you know, two bedroom apartments in inner city areas. But we're not so good at delivering
04:47 what's known as the missing middle. It's a typology that exists between those two extremes.
04:53 We've talked about it for a long time, but it's quite difficult to achieve, often because
04:58 you're trying to do it in established suburbs and neighbourhoods, where often existing residents
05:05 aren't always very keen on seeing change. And they're getting pretty good at resisting
05:11 that change, unfortunately, in my view.
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