Gemma Kemp is a single mother living out of a campervan with her two boys after her Lismore home was inundated by floods three weeks ago.
Almost 3400 homes have been declared uninhabitable and a further 6708 were inundated by floodwaters during the crisis.
More than 1000 people are still living in emergency accommodation and 134 remain in evacuation centres, while thousands take refuge in the homes of families and friends.
Ms Kemp lost most of her possessions and is now staying in a small, borrowed pop-top caravan while her home is repaired.
“The only thing that makes me cry is the kindness of others,” said the 40-year-old sitting on a bench under her house.
Her landlord is working around the clock to repair her house, now scrubbed clean, but the kitchen has been destroyed.
“We’re waiting on a new kitchen and an electrician to restore power,” she said. “The nicest thing my landlord said was, ‘This is my house, but it’s your home’, and that has been one of the things that’s kept me going.”
Monster piles of rubbish, not yet carted away, line their street. She warns her seven and nine-year-old sons not to touch the soiled toys in the mounds of trash.
“When I wake up in the morning it’s a pretty scary feeling for a moment, but then I know if I can put on my face, my boys will be OK,” she said.
The water started entering Ms Kemp’s house at 4am on Monday, February 28.
It was another 10 hours until she was rescued by a stranger in a tin motorboat.
By then she was standing in chest-high water screaming for help out of a window. Her boys were on the top of their double bunk eating breakfast cereal.
The family’s next stop was a Lismore evacuation centre.
“I’ve only been in the evacuation centres briefly,” Ms Kemp explained.
“I find them quite intimidating. The staff are wonderful but out the front there’s often men, just lying in beds, smoking cigarettes and stuff … I’m just saying it’s not the kind of place I want my children to be.”
Even before the floods, the Northern Rivers had an acute housing shortage – Homelessness NSW estimated the region, with a population of around 300,000, needexjmtzywd another 2300 rental properties.
Ms Kemp and her children have few housing options except to wait for their rental to be repaired. Most of her neighbours have evacuated.
She is also struggling to navigate government flood grants, saying she waited five hours at a service centre to get advice.
Despite the challenges, Ms Kemp describes herself as one of the lucky ones. She has been given paid leave at her part-time job and is studying accountancy at university.
In the electorate of Page – inclusive of Lismore and Woodburn – 68 per cent of renters had difficulty meeting their rental costs before the floods, according to new data from the Everybody’s Home campaign.
As housing stock shrinks and flood survivors face the piling financial costs of rebuilding their lives, social housing operators are concerned that there is not enough affordable housing to meet the needs of the displaced.
A group of 150 organisations – including corporates, unions, community and faith organisations – have written a joint letter to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg calling on him to allocate social housing investment into the upcoming budget.
They are requesting 25,000 more social and affordable housing properties to become available each year and a 50 per cent increase to the federal rental assistance scheme.
