More than one million Aussie homes at risk from fires, floods as housing crisis deepens

News.com.au

8 hours ago

More than 1000 homes have been left uninhabitable by devastating floods on the NSW Mid-North Coast, a report has found, amid fears the climate crisis could put millions more at risk.
The report by the Housing, Homelessness, and Disasters National Symposium last week found 1153 homes were left uninhabitable by the floods. Another 1831 homes were damaged.
Some 23,000 Australians are displaced by floods, bushfires, and cyclones each year, with the report finding 5.6 million homes are at risk from bushfires as climate impacts accelerate.
Homeless Australia CEO Kate Colvin said as climate disasters become more regular, there was a risk of a 'two-tiered society' in which housing security determined disaster survival.
'There is a gap between people who are best able to protect themselves and people who are least able to,' she said.
Ms Colvin said renters were often limited to cheaper properties in more flood-prone areas and were less resilient to climate-related disasters, compared with higher-income earners.
Renters also often had less access to government support and faced a 'superheated' rental market.
'They can't compete because all those people who had insurance often also get a special payments system to afford rent during the time when their home is not available,' Ms Colvin said.
'They then can't get a rental because you've got this superheated market, so you have another wave of homelessness just because of the housing market impact'.
Ms Colvin called on the federal government to make renters or people facing homelessness a priority in future disaster responses, and include disaster resilience in its 10-year housing plan.
'In the planning phase, include the homelessness sector, include strategies around housing resilience … (and) in the response phase, be inclusive of people who are facing homelessness.'
The symposium brought together more than 100 professionals across the housing, emergency management, and governmental sectors to examine how 'secondary crises' affect NSW.
Factors included the prevalence of construction workers who flood disaster zones in the wake of climate events, inadvertently driving up rents for already struggling locals.
The symposium found that in Australia, some 953,000 homes were vulnerable to flooding and 17,500 were at threat from coastal erosion, with 169,000 people on the public housing list.
HowWeSurvive UNSW Sydney academic and co-author of the symposium report, Dr Timothy Heffernan, said climate disasters were already hitting 'housing-vulnerable' communities.
'When you have 6.5 million homes at risk from bushfires, floods or coastal erosion, and a housing system that can't meet demand, every disaster becomes a humanitarian crisis,' he said.
'Hotels and motels fill up immediately, caravan parks are often in flood-prone areas … We're asking an already strained system to absorb sudden surges of thousands of displaced people.'
Social Futures general manager Martelle Geurts said the Northern Rivers housing system was 'already fragile' when it was hit by the 2022 flood disaster, damaging more than 10,000 homes.
Despite extensive recovery efforts, the Northern Rivers accounted for about a third of rough sleepers in NSW in 2025.
The most recent NSW Street Count - an annual audit of people facing homelessness - found 346 people sleeping rough in the City of Sydney. In the Northern Rivers, there were 654 people.
'Climate events are becoming more frequent and severe, and they destroy homes. So, climate change and homelessness are inextricably linked,' Ms Geurts said.
'People can't recover without stable housing.
'Disasters displace people and can cause lasting trauma. Some people experience PTSD, and the impact of that can be lifelong.
'What we know is that people can't recover psychologically unless they have a secure place to live.'