The Northern Rivers region was already facing a crippling rental shortage before record-breaking floods destroyed thousands of houses, and governments are scrambling to find solutions.
On a chilly winter's morning in northern New South Wales, Terri Leahy is helping her eight-year-old son Maxx get ready for school.Service NSW received 12,000 applications for rental support payments following the February floods
Before they moved into their tent, Terri Leahy and her son also lived in a car and bounced around different temporary accommodations. Ms Leahy says she and Maxx lived in a car for 10 days, then bounced around different temporary accommodation – sometimes up to 90 minutes away from Maxx's school. "There's no rentals, and if there are, they're hard for anyone to get and the prices are through the roof… so I've really got no idea," she says.John McKenna, CEO of North Coast Community Housing, says around 3,000 properties have been deemed uninhabitable due to flood damage."So if you put what's already happened post-floods on top of that, it's made an already really dire situation even more dire.
But Ms Saffin says pod villages are not suitable for everyone, and the community urgently needs alternative housing solutions. "And I did not have any more photographs because I couldn't access [the property] in the second flood.Ms de Groot eventually threatened to go to the media. She says her application was approved the next day.
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