On the edge of Lismore is the home of Chris Gurr and his son, nestled among a forest of fruit and nut trees. The flecked paint on the house, which is more than 100 years old, is one of the few reminders of the flood waters that three years ago had lapped just centimetres from the loft.
They don’t own the home, a friend does. Eighteen months ago the friend said Gurr and his 11-year-old son could live there after they lost everything they owned when their rental was hit by the worst flood in Australia’s modern history. This new home is nothing fancy, Gurr says, but it has character and is peaceful.
“This house is me,” Gurr, a poet and artist, says when asked to describe it.
But next week they must leave. The date has come for the owner to settle on the government’s offer to buy back the home – the terms of which require it to be empty.
“I try not to think about it too much. But at times that’s unavoidable,” Gurr says. “I think I’m more emotional right now than I have been for a long time because of what’s going to come.
“I will be homeless from 5 March.”
Friday marked three years on from the first of Lismore’s catastrophic floods, which wiped out 4,000 homes in a region already beset by a housing crisis. Since then, that crisis has only deepened, with people seeking a home where they can. Meanwhile, many continue to wait in limbo amid criticism the body responsible for the recovery has been slow and confusing.
“It has been a slow progression of getting worse and worse,” says Cathy Serventy, the chief executive of Social Futures, a housing charity that has more than 100 people on its waitlist.
“There’s less affordability, less properties, and the flood wiped away most of the cheaper rentals.”
‘It’s providing for vulnerable people’
Adam Guise, who owns the house Gurr is living in and is a Greens councillor in Lismore, wants Gurr to be allowed to stay until the Reconstruction Authority (RA) assesses what to do with his house.
“They are buybacks for a reason, to take people out of harm’s way,” Guise says. “But I guess the process has been quite nebulous, and it certainly hasn’t been grounded in the reality of a housing crisis where many of these homes are perfectly habitable in the interim.”
The RA will determine, as with all buybacks, if the house can be relocated, or if it will be demolished and the materials recycled. Guise dreads seeing it bulldozed and hopes it’s relocated, or left and turned into a hikers’ hut.
While that decision is made, the home will be boarded up, the power and water cut, and a tall metal fence erected around the property. The RA will employ someone to keep the lawns tidy.
The government has bought back more than 600 homes from Lismore residents who lived on the floodplain. In three years since the flood, only four of those homes have been relocated.
A ‘natural response’
Some have decided to move into the homes. Rio, a student, has been living in a buyback for about eight months with two others. The owner knows they’re there, Rio says. “He’s very supportive.”
The trio have pulled down the fences which the RA once erected to cordon off the home. It is now a trellis for beans in their vegetable garden.
Rio is a 23-year-old student at Southern Cross University in Lismore, whose family home is around half an hour from town. The driveway to his home was cut off for nine months after the floods due to a landslide.
He had been living in a share house that he then had to leave quickly due to it being unsafe. He looked for other rentals, but couldn’t afford what was available, so he decided to move into an empty buyback.
“I see it as a natural response that these houses would be lived in,” he says.
“Further from that, I see it as a community response to this disaster and to fix the problems the government hasn’t gotten around to. It’s providing for vulnerable people who would rather live in a house that may flood than their car, caravan, or a tent.”
The police have come multiple times to try and move them on. Rio says they are trying to negotiate with the Reconstruction Authority, with the main demand being that they’ll leave when the house is due to be either relocated or the materials recycled.
The RA has claimed that the continued occupation of the houses is preventing it from making decisions about the properties.
“We do not know when the next major flood will be and these homes pose a serious and ongoing risk to human life,” a spokesperson said, adding that notices to vacate were handed to 40 people in January.
What would Rio do if he’s forced to leave? “It’s a good question,” he says.
“Due to the fact I’m from around here, I do have a bit of a safety net – it would mean couch surfing for a while, or I don’t know.”
‘I will stay for as long as I can’
Many of the people who have begun to occupy buybacks are not locals, however.
Guardian Australia understands that word got around at a recent festival that there were hundreds of homes sitting empty in Lismore. This led a number of backpackers and travellers from abroad to head there and move in. Most of these people are concentrated on one street which has now been dubbed “squatters’ lane”.
This has drawn the ire of many residents. The state Labor MP for Lismore, Janelle Saffin, tells Guardian Australia that the “community already has enough to deal with” without worrying about backpackers squatting in homes.
However, others are there out of desperation. Tina Middleton, 52, is living in a small room with her 16-year-old son in one of the houses occupied by the backpackers.
The pair had been living in their car on the Central Coast on and off for almost two years after escaping domestic violence.
“We have water, toilet, a shower,” she says of her new home.
“I will stay for as long as I can because I’ve been living in survival mode for too long. It’s hard to find support for women like me who have been left by their husbands with nothing. We’ve been stripped to our bare bones.”
‘A decision that I had to make’
Those on the other side of the crisis – who lost homes they owned in the floods – say the process of learning about their options has been agonisingly slow.
In three years, 14 homes have been raised, four have been retrofitted and four have been relocated, according to the RA. There are 14 more that have been approved for one of these modifications and are waiting for it to be complete.
Maralyn Schofield still had a mortgage on her home, which was in the direct path of the floods. She has used the money she gained from the buyback to buy another home. But she could only afford one that is also in the flood zone.
“If it’s like the 2022 flood again, I’ll lose everything in the water, it will be up to my waist. But it’s a lot safer,” she says.
“We’re at least not at threat of dying, like [in] my old home. We love it here and it’s beautiful, and we’re really happy, but you carry the whole time that you’re only one small disaster away from losing everything.”
She’s often asked, sometimes rudely, why didn’t she just move out of town to somewhere cheaper. She says she felt she had to stay to be near services for her adult son who has a disability. It’s also her community.
Schofield says the messaging from the RA on her options was confusing. She says she had a phone call telling her that she was eligible for a program that provides a block of land outside the flood zone.
“I ask, ‘well, how much are these blocks of land?’,” she recalls of the conversation.
“And they say ‘we don’t know’ … I go, ‘well, OK, well, maybe I will get out of the flood zone, so how do I build a house? Is there loans? What sort of houses are they?’.
“[They say] ‘We don’t know. We don’t know’.”
Saffin says the recovery has been community driven, which means it has taken longer than people hoped.
“We all want it immediately but recovery takes a really long time,” she says.
Meanwhile, Sue Higginson, a Greens NSW MLC, who is from the northern rivers, says the way the government has rolled out the recovery has led to greater housing insecurity and homelessness.
“Those floods shattered lives, they took so much from people, including those who had very little already, and the response from government, while ambitious, has missed the mark.”
When it comes time for Gurr to pack up and go on Wednesday, he says he has two options: sleep on a friend’s couch or in his car. He doesn’t want to have to turn to temporary housing or a boarding house.
He found a home he could afford on his disability support pension about an hour outside Lismore. But it would mean taking his son out of his school, and the loss of his safety net.
“This is where my community is,” he says.
