It’s been more than two years since Lachlan Gleeson grabbed his cat and climbed onto the roof of his house in south Lismore to be rescued after his home was engulfed by the area’s worst flood in recorded history.
He’s now part of a community that has sprung up on Lake and Pine Street in the regional city in northern New South Wales, long after the flood water has receded.
Gleeson has been squatting in houses on the two streets since early June. Built on the floodplain, the timber Queenslanders were deemed unliveable after the February 2022 disaster. The houses are vacant, waiting to be relocated to higher ground after being purchased by the government in a “buyback”.
Some of the people living in them call themselves “caretakers” of the unused homes they say would otherwise go to waste, or even be demolished. They’ve stayed despite multiple eviction notices being served to them by police on behalf of the NSW Reconstruction Authority (NSWRA), the state government agency in charge of the flood recovery.
In one notice to vacate sent to a home on Lake Street, which Gleeson says they were given by police on 1 August and Guardian Australia has seen a copy of, the agency says it is the owner of the property and the people living there are “unlawfully occupying it”.
But Gleeson says he and the others have a few reasons for staying put.
“Mainly because the housing affordability around here is really bad. It’s hard to get a place,” he says. “The community aspect is also a big one, and also the political aspect.
“I don’t think this many houses should be sitting here, going to waste, rotting away, when there’s so many people struggling with housing at the moment.”
The house Gleeson used to live in is in south Lismore. Despite being inundated, he says it wasn’t deemed eligible for a government buyback.
“Obviously all the stuff was destroyed and the house didn’t get a buyback. So my mum’s still in that house,” he says.
Gleeson says the NSWRA has hired a private security company to monitor the empty houses people are squatting in. He claims the agency has been difficult to engage with.
“We did have negotiations with some of the higher ups, but, generally speaking, it’s a very bureaucratic and very untransparent body,” he says.
After receiving the latest eviction notice, he was expecting police to try to evict them on 2 August, but he says they never showed up.
A NSWRA spokesperson said the unauthorised use of the properties without power and water posed an “unacceptable risk” to health and safety, “including an increased risk from fire and sanitation issues as well as the impact of mould”.
“Our focus is on ensuring those homes are removed or reused and recycled,” they said.
They said people living in the empty homes had been offered “more appropriate housing solutions” which they had “so far refused”.
Roisin McSweeney says she was offered a week-long stay at a hotel in nearby Ballina and to join the social housing waitlist as an alternative to squatting on Pine St.
“When they told me that, I was like, that sounds unstable, and it’s costing the government so much money,” she says. “My home is in Lismore, my work, my study, my life is in Lismore.”
McSweeney believes leaving the houses empty is a “missed opportunity” for “creative solutions”.
Aidan Ricketts, who is living in his own flood-damaged home on Lake Street, describes himself as one of the squatters’ “closest neighbours”. Ricketts, who saved 16 people and five dogs in the floods, has been approved for a buyback but says he is waiting to find the right property to purchase.
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He says not everyone living in the empty homes are squatters. He describes their living situation as “a spectrum”.
“There’s people at every different stage of this situation ranging from a seller that haven’t sold it yet [or] people who’ve sold the house but want a license to occupy while they wait to move,” he says.
“And then you’ve got tenants who are renting, and the house gets sold, and they’re having even more trouble getting licenses to occupy.
“And then, of course, at the far end, you’ve got the young people squatting in some of the empty houses, and they don’t have a licence to occupy.”
A licence to occupy is a legal agreement that grants a person the right to use a property for a defined period, something Ricketts says he is negotiating for his own home pending his relocation.
Ricketts says the people who are squatting are a “lovely bunch”.
“I’m probably one of the closest neighbours,” he says. “They’re sort of doing nothing more than preserving the homes and providing a bit of homelessness relief in the town.”
The Lismore mayor, Steve Krieg, appears to disagree. He told the ABC in June that the homes were empty for a reason.
“People are putting themselves and their friends at risk if they think that they can advertise for people to come to Lismore and live in these currently disused homes,” he said. Krieg did not respond to Guardian Australia’s request for comment.
Ricketts says Lismore has a “massive” problem with homelessness and that the bushland adjacent to Pine Street has long been home to tent camps. There were 64 people sleeping rough in Lismore in February, compared with 40 the previous year, according to the NSW government’s annual street count of rough sleepers.
The neighbouring Byron shire accounts for the largest cohort of rough sleepers in the state, recording 348 people sleeping rough in February, a 16% increase from the year before.
But Ricketts says it’s not a black and white issue.
“I don’t think there’s, like, goodies and baddies in this,” he says. “I think the [Reconstruction Authority] is on a learning curve, and there were assumptions and mistakes made in the beginning, but the more they listen to the community, the more the process can be adapted to be a lot more humane.”
Guardian Australia has contacted NSW police for comment.