The discussion on theconversation is really good. Adding comments here might well be superfluous. I went browsing, and a lot of things said there made sense. "good intentions" aren't enough when it comes to human habitation, and a lot of design concerns were broken, ignored, or misunderstood in a context of expediency, with a long tail.<p>It's sad, because this may prevent better re-runs "next time" and by golly there will be more "next time"s a-plenty. I think it's important people try, but they have to try better: This one, it didn't work.<p>The state run re-homing projects in Australia for the floods here, have been a shitshow: too little, badly sited, really badly handled. In some places (Lismore) they're using demountables and "little homes" which meet spec (in most ways) because we have a huge industry of fly-in fly-out mining work and consequently have a big industry which understands how to make temporary-longlife shelter. The problems are mostly organisational. (not involved, and probably could be corrected on this)<p>In other places (Goodna) the residents are very unhappy. Traditionally ignored, now feeling really badly ignored, facing buybacks in a market for housing which has gone crazy, to live there they had to be cash-poor, and now, even with support are going to struggle to find "good" homes.<p>We built quarantine camps (unfortunately not close to these flood zones) which could re-house hundreds, if not thousand(s) of the affected families, but at huge disruption.<p>We emptied them out of caravan parks, to free up caravans for pre-booked holiday makers, to get the revenue from holidays into the (badly battered) local economy. De-housing locals, to get .. richer holiday maker money. Its bizarre.
They spent $27M to build 209 houses. That’s $245k/house and odd that their construction costs are so high.<p>This seems like a charity with a good idea but poor cost efficiency.