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.
Their routine looks a bit different these days.
Four months after floodwaters destroyed their rental home in Coraki, 30 minutes south of Lismore, they are living in a tent in their backyard.
Maxx sits inches from a small portable heater, warming his bare hands and feet, while Terri grabs milk for his cereal from a caravan fridge she found on the side of the road.
"It's hard not to cry… because it's not ideal," Ms Leahy says.
"My son is comfortable; he says he is, but it's not a nice feeling."
The mother and son are among many left homeless after floods destroyed thousands of properties in a region that was already facing a crippling rental shortage.
In the absence of stable housing, displaced residents are couch surfing and living in tents or cars, while some have returned to uninhabitable, mould-infested homes, lining their stripped-out walls with discarded election corflutes in a bid to keep warm.
In February, Ms Leahy and Maxx watched as floodwaters inched up their back steps, making a last-minute escape when Maxx's father showed up in a tinny.
Hours later, only the roof of their home was visible above the water level.
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.
"I got sick of chopping and changing Maxx, and also travelling back and forth every day for school, so camping seemed to be our easiest, best option," she says.
Ms Leahy has been talking to various NSW government agencies about finding more stable housing, and is on the waitlist for a caravan, but with her landlord eager to begin repairs on the property, she is not sure where to go next.
"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.
Already 3,000 people on social housing waitlist before floods
John McKenna, CEO of North Coast Community Housing, says around 3,000 properties have been deemed uninhabitable due to flood damage.
"We already had 3,000 people on the social housing waitlist before the floods," he says.
"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."
Mr McKenna's organisation has partnered with newly-formed state agency Resilience NSW to set up the first of several temporary villages, where displaced people will live for at least two years while the region rebuilds.
The first operational village at Wollongbar, outside Lismore, is a mix of renovated shipping containers, larger modular homes, and caravans.
Village residents will live rent-free for at least 12 months.
Housing solutions the 'missing piece' in flood recovery
The NSW government promised to deliver up to 2,000 modular homes in April — so far, only 25 are operational and tenanted.
State Labor MP for Lismore, Janelle Saffin, says the rollout of the villages has been too slow.
"It's absolutely pathetic … where are they?" says Ms Saffin.
Mr McKenna says other villages are tied up in lease negotiations between state and local governments.
A NSW parliamentary inquiry into the flood response heard the state government hopes to complete the villages this year, and is exploring other short and long-term housing options in the interim.
But Ms Saffin says pod villages are not suitable for everyone, and the community urgently needs alternative housing solutions.
"It's really a big missing piece in the recovery, and we don't get clear information about what's happening," she says.
Grant scheme labelled a 'cruel hoax'
The 2022 NSW Flood Inquiry also revealed fewer than one in five people statewide had received a rental support payment to cover short-term accommodation, despite around 12,000 applications to Service NSW – prompting inquiry chairman Walt Secord to label the scheme "a cruel hoax".
Figures provided to 7.30 from Service NSW show that, of the 6,345 rental support applications in the Northern Rivers:
- 31 per cent were approved
- 54 per cent were denied due to ineligibility (16 per cent due to fraud)
- 8 per cent required further information
- 7 per cent are being triaged for fraud
Single mother Lauren de Groot says it took around seven weeks for her grant application to be approved after she was twice rejected for being unable to provide a current lease agreement and photographs of her flooded home.
"And I did not have any more photographs because I couldn't access [the property] in the second flood.
"So asking for more proof of flooding, while it was flooded, felt ridiculous."
Ms de Groot eventually threatened to go to the media. She says her application was approved the next day.
The disability support worker is living with her three-year-old daughter in a mould-infested house on private property while saving to build a transportable tiny home.
"No one should be living in a house like this, but that's our only option short of a tent," she says.
"And in the winter, mould is better than cold.
"I'm still floundering every day just to provide a roof over my daughter's head.
A Service NSW spokesperson said in some cases, the agency could accept statutory declarations where the applicant was unable to provide sufficient supporting documentation.
"Service NSW seeks to administer grants in a way that balances the guidelines set by Resilience NSW and the Commonwealth and the need to support people recovering from the devastation of natural disaster whilst ensuring money is not paid to ineligible applicants, particularly where fraud is suspected," they said.
7.30 also submitted questions to Resilience NSW and NSW Emergency Services Minister Stephanie Cooke, but did not receive a response before the deadline.
The NSW parliamentary inquiry will deliver its final report on the flood recovery next month.
A separate independent inquiry, led by Mick Fuller and Professor Mary O'Kane, will table its report by the end of July.
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