The frequency and severity of disasters in NSW have risen in recent years, with compounding effects. These include the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, the 2022 Northern Rivers floods, and the 2025 mid-north coast floods, among others. Such a rapid succession of disasters has not only damaged infrastructure and housing but also displaced families and entire communities, placing them in temporary accommodation and limiting their ability to recover amid escalating housing pressures.

A 2024 Domain report found around half of all Australian properties are at bushfire risk – that is 5.6 million dwellings. NSW (1.9 million homes), Queensland (1.6 million) and Victoria (763,000) are the most exposed. By 2030, over three million homes will face riverine flood risk, with 500,000 deemed high risk, impacting insurability. Meanwhile, Australian governments plan to build 1.2 million new homes by 2029. Adding to existing housing stock is a positive, but securing sites away from hazards, or effectively mitigating their effects, remains a key challenge.

As disasters increase, the task of providing immediate and longer-term housing relief becomes more complex. Currently, motels, pods and caravans are the most commonly used post-disaster housing options – but each involves trade-offs. Research shows homeowners may rebuild, but rural areas face delays due to rising costs, trade shortages or insurance. Others remain in unstable temporary housing in the long term, leave their communities altogether or return to unsafe homes. Temporary “pod villages” are also costly and slow to deliver. Meanwhile, rates of at-risk homelessness often grow following a disaster as competition for housing intensifies.

In a new AHURI report, we examined the best housing recovery policies and practices that meet both immediate needs and contribute to future disaster preparedness. In this article, we focus on two case studies from NSW: the Snowy Valleys and the Northern Rivers.

The NSW State Disaster Mitigation Plan provides a toolkit to reduce hazard exposure and vulnerability by improving building codes and standards. However, emergency and transitional housing priorities remain underdeveloped. We suggest that a future-focused policy framework must bridge housing supply, land use planning and local disaster preparedness. Only then can NSW move from reactive crisis management to effective and inclusive housing recovery.

Pre-disaster housing precarity exposed

Disasters expose the scale of precarity. In the Northern Rivers, housing insecurity was rampant before the 2022 floods with around 1,500 people experiencing homelessness. The COVID-19 pandemic, which preceded the floods, intensified those pressures and drove up property prices while pushing low-income residents to the margins. Those living in informal or overcrowded housing (often in flood-prone areas) were among the most severely impacted.

The immediate response was marked by accommodation shortages. Hotels and motels were either inundated or overwhelmed, leaving many people in cramped or unsuitable conditions. In some cases, those in vulnerable housing situations were misclassified as tourists, making them ineligible for sustained support.

Temporary solutions such as caravans and pods were mobilised through rapid procurement by the NSW Reconstruction Authority and the Department of Communities and Justice. Partnerships with housing providers and a “Registration of Interest” process enabled these to be deployed at speed. Over 500 pods were installed in eleven villages, while the At-Home Caravans Program allowed people to remain on their land, critical for maintaining social ties and wellbeing.

In the Snowy Valleys, the 2019–20 bushfires also hit the region amid existing housing strain. Entire towns such as Batlow and Tumbarumba were evacuated for weeks, but housing relief was limited due to local shortages and the presence of tourists and itinerant fruit pickers. Temporary housing relied heavily on what was available.

Eleven pods and six cabins provided support but were only accessible because they arrived shortly after the fires. Demand exceeded supply and displaced residents cycled between caravan parks, friends’ homes and transitional housing. Although the local council secured housing assets and land, tenancy decisions were made by state agencies, limiting responsiveness to local needs.

Temporary housing: complex and frustrating

The transition to long-term housing revealed structural challenges. More than 18 months after the Northern Rivers floods, over 1,000 people remained in temporary accommodation, with 700 people on waitlists in the two years post-flood and fewer than 30 in permanent housing. While some attribute this to poor program design, a root problem was a chronic shortage of affordable housing before the disaster. People in informal housing, especially in affluent areas, often missed out on support, given that programs were designed for homeowners. Despite a glut of rentals, platforms such as Airbnb were not leveraged, exposing tensions between housing as a private asset and a public good.

In the colder Snowy Valleys, the use of diesel-powered cabins underscored the risks of deploying housing without adequate services, which can be cost-prohibitive. Outcomes improved when surge accommodation options were connected to services and deployed on council or private land with case management and a one-stop recovery hub. These issues highlight the need for pre-disaster investment in identifying serviceable land and scalable housing, as well as diverse stakeholder contributions to housing and services planning, including not-for-profits and councils.

The role (and limits) of local government

Local councils were essential, particularly in identifying land, advocating for resources and coordinating with recovery partners. They also helped update regulations to allow for pods and caravans on private land. Yet their influence was constrained given the NSW Government stood up the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation that dealt directly with households, government recovery partners and housing damage assessors.

In this context, local government areas especially lacked the resources to maintain or activate robust emergency housing and maintain influence.

Towards an integrated housing and disaster policy

NSW’s recent experiences point to several policy priorities.

First, housing must be treated as critical infrastructure, essential not only for shelter, but for community stability and long-term recovery. This message is inherent in the NSW State Disaster Mitigation Plan but is currently not reflected in post-disaster policies or programs. Governments must continue to invest in pre-disaster planning and embed surge procurement mechanisms to provide diverse shelter and housing options. This includes suitable options for renters and the growing number of those experiencing, or at-risk of, homelessness. There should also be coordination mechanisms across all levels of government to future-proof housing policies.

Second, mechanisms should meet local needs and reflect a region’s socioeconomic, geographic and climatic profile. Programs such as the pod villages and At-Home Caravans succeeded in part because of rapid cross-sector collaboration and on-site accommodation. These examples show that integrated and flexible approaches to housing and disaster recovery are both possible and necessary. Nonetheless, these programs lacked transition planning to set people up with longer-term housing solutions. For this reason, temporary pod villages should be seen as a last resort and, if used, need to include a transition plan.

Third, local governments should be better resourced and prepared for their central role in community mitigation and preparedness planning, empowered by the state and federal governments. The State Disaster Mitigation Plan reflects this point but could strengthen its approach to localised disaster recovery by having plans in place for post-disaster temporary shelter arrangements, together with local housing providers. Indeed, a fourth “R” for resilience could be added to local government authorities’ core business of roads, rates and rubbish.

Fourth, housing policies need to account for the needs of the insecurely housed. For instance, there should be discrete accommodation options that avoid simply classifying such cohorts as “tourists” in temporary accommodation, given that this can affect the options available. This is dependent on increasing supply and access to social and affordable housing.

Finally, community-centred recovery approaches should be used to guide housing recovery and inform decision-making. Such approaches are seldom used in housing recovery policies, despite Australia’s shared responsibility framework. Community engagement prior to disaster is a key ingredient of recovery, evidenced by the most effective relief programs being community centred.

Dr Timothy Heffernan is Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the Australian National University. His research, based in the Nordics and Australia, aims to support community recovery after disasters and crisis. He regularly publishes academic articles, policy blog and other reporting that uses qualitative insights to improve recovery outcomes.

Dr Mittul Vahanvati is a Program Manager and Senior Lecturer in the Sustainability and Urban Planning program at RMIT University in Melbourne. Her research focuses on disaster resilience for housing and capacity building of stakeholders (people, policymakers and practitioners) for making risk-informed decisions. Trained as an architect, practiced for over 8 years prior, she adopts co-design, knowledge co-production and systems thinking approaches in her longitudinal, applied research in the context of India, Solomon Islands and Australia.

Professor David Sanderson is the Inaugural Judith Neilson Chair of Architecture at UNSW Sydney. He has over 30 years working in practice and academia in disaster resilience across the world. As well as Australia, David has held full and visiting professorships in Norway, UK, France, Spain and the US. In 2023 David founded the new long term, independently funded initiative HowWeSurvive, aimed at reshaping disaster recovery.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Professor Darryn McEvoy, Associate Professor Dulani Halvitigala and Dr Ananya Majumdar to the research design, data collection and analysis that informed this article. Research was supported through funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

Image credit: Sandra Dans from corelens