Rachel and her partner, Harley, are expecting a baby in October. But they’ve got nowhere to live, so for now they’re camped out in a tent at Hobart Showground.

The tent has three rooms. Right now, one is being used as a storage room. It’s crammed with bags and boxes. Soon, it’ll be the baby’s room.

“This is a storage room until we turn it into a baby nursery. Which is not really good in a tent,” Rachel told Hack.

Despite her circumstances, Rachel is upbeat.

“I’ve got my own fridge. And I’ve got power which I’m allowed to have, which I’m pretty thankful for,” she said.

As winter nears, temperatures plunge. The average temperature for May is around 15 degrees celsius. Rachel’s lived through a winter here before, and she’s not looking forward to it.

“There was a really really big storm, a big gust storm. And I couldn’t handle it,” she said.

“I was actually wearing the other side of the tent as a blanket when I was in bed because the whole thing just collapsed onto me.”

I put the pillow over my head coz I said to myself, if I can’t see it, it’s not happening. Just stay in a ball and you’ll be fine.

Rachel and Harley are among a handful of people who’ve sought emergency accommodation in the showground.

“There’s always been a homeless element in the park, but as you’d expect there’s complex issues. There were other factors at play, there were often drugs, alcohol, mental health issues,” manager Scott Gadd told Hack.

At its busiest in December, the showground housed 12 different families in tents dotted around the property, Scott said.

Working families seeking help

It was around that time that Scott noticed a change in the kinds of people who sought emergency accommodation.

When you see working families living in tents in the park, with kids trying to go to school, that had a big impact on me.

He said the showground is just the tip of the iceberg.

“For every one person I’ve got in here, there’s probably another 20 in greater Hobart somewhere - in a garage, couch surfing, under a tree, in a park. And that’s where the problem is,” he said.

Dr Kathleen Flanagan from the University of Tasmania said vulnerable people - like Rachel - have been struggling to find affordable accommodation in Hobart for a while now.

But she said the spotlight is well and truly on the issue now that working families are struggling, too.

“What we’re starting to see is even those people are having difficulty finding housing they can afford, and that’s when the political attention comes to bear,” Kathleen said.

So how did we get here?

Chances are, if you’re from the mainland you’ve probably been sold the message that Tassie is a beacon for affordable housing.

Well, it was. But that’s changed.

“We’ve seen a significant and rapid increase in rents,” Kathleen said.

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Whatsapp Rachel and Harley live in a tent in Hobart Showground, and they're about to have a baby.

And it’s not just one thing that got us here; rather a confluence of events that’s created an incredibly tight market.

Firstly, Tassie has done a stellar job of marketing itself as a tourist hotspot. But the ensuing economic boom took people by surprise.

People started investing in property and moving back from the mainland, and they all needed a place to stay, Adrian Kelly from the Real Estate Institute of Tasmania told Hack.

“What we’ve seen over the last 18 months, 2 years, is a massive surge of demand caused not only by people who want to buy an investment property, but there’s also a lot of people moving back home,” he said.

And the tourism boom took some houses that were earmarked as full time rentals, and put them into short-term accommodation like Airbnb.

Even a relatively small number can skew a market the size of Hobart.

“If there’s 300 properties taken out of the market, then that’s a lot,” Adrian said.

Then there’s the fact that state and territory governments across the country have been pulling out of social housing, and offering incentives for private landlords to fill the gap.

Rentals are businesses, and landlords rightly want to ensure they have the best and most reliable tenants they can have.

But that squeezes out people on income support, single parents, and people with complex needs - like domestic violence survivors and their families.

“You can’t have a market where house prices start to go up and up and up and have affordable housing,” Kathleen said.

Young people are especially disadvantaged

Young people, who have the least capital accrued, and the shortest rental histories to draw from, find themselves especially exposed in a market like that.

The rental market in Hobart is super tight right now.

“We have a vacancy rate last time I heard of I think 0.3 per cent,” Kathleen said.

Which means tenants have little bargaining power if their landlords decide to hike up the rent. Plus, they face difficulties in securing a place if they choose to go elsewhere.

“What a lot of people are doing is offering more than the asked rent. People have also been offering to pay double the amount of bond,” Adrian said.

In Tasmania, there’s no limit to how much landlords can raise the rent, as long as the final figure is in line with the rest of the market.

Adrian acknowledged that massive rent hikes do happen, though he said that’s relatively rare.

I’ve heard of a couple of cases where rents have gone up 30 or 40 percent.

“But I suspect in those cases they’re long-term tenanted properties and the rent hasn’t been put up in many, many years,” Adrian said.

Living in dangerous conditions

The result of all of this is that people are staying put in accommodation, even if it’s dangerous or unsuitable.

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Whatsapp Dawn estimates that she and her partner have spent thousands on dealing with problems that her landlord should be fixing.

Like Hobart viticulture student, Dawn*.

Dawn and her fiance live in a three-bedroom house in a nice suburb of Hobart. The property itself is dilapidated and in urgent need of attention.

There are nails sticking out of the floorboards, broken cupboard doors, hobs that don’t work on the stovetop, inadequate fencing, tilting walls that are coming away from the skirting boards.

But far more worrying is the faulty electrics. In the kitchen there are scorch marks on the wiring where it caught alight.

Dawn reckons she and her partner have spent THOUSANDS on fixing up little bits and pieces that should have been sorted out by the landlord.

It was going to be savings for us to move overseas or potentially savings for getting married, but it’s gone. All of it is gone.

Dawn’s really worried about what will happen if she leaves this place without another one lined up, because even finding this one was a struggle.

“When we were looking for this place, I was still working full time as a nurse for a private medical company. My partner is a civil engineer essentially and… we were two weeks away from homelessness,” she said.

“Never in a million years did I think that I would be vulnerable or at risk of being homeless.”

The couple is going to stick it out until the end of this lease, and if things don’t change, they’ll consider leaving Hobart for good.

“Even though it’s our home and we love it and we don’t want to go because our friends are here, our family’s here, our clubs our sports our everything, there’s no opportunity for us to grow as a couple and potentially as a family,” Dawn said.