Kevin “Rusty” Adams’ home flooded in 2011, in 2017, and again in 2022.
He has lived in Brisbane’s Paddington area his entire life – and no flood is going to drive him from the community or his home in the low-lying area near Rosalie Village.
“That’s a daunting thought,” Rusty said, when asked if he’d ever considered leaving. “I’ve got four other brothers who live up the coast and they want me to move up. But this is where I live.”
In the aftermath of the floods that hit Queensland and northern NSW this month, some communities are reckoning with a harsh and climate-fuelled reality: that their homes may become uninsurable or even uninhabitable. Some are questioning whether to rebuild. Others have called for property buybacks.
There has also been plenty of commentary about the need for “climate resilience”, without much – if any – detail about what that term really means.
Rusty said that to understand climate resilience, take a look at his place. About a year ago, as part of a Brisbane city council program to help renovate flood-prone homes, the ground-floor unit was retrofitted to cope with inundation.
Skirting boards were replaced with wall tiles up to the highest level defined in the council’s flood mapping. Waterproof kitchen and bathroom cabinets were installed.
After the worst flood Rusty could remember came through, he lost some property, but was able to quickly clean up his place and keep living in the unit.
“Because of the way they’d tiled the place I was able to put a hose right through my unit,” he said.
“Really there was no structural damage to my place at all, because of the work these guys did.
“The guy next door in unit two, beside me, he’s only a renter, he’d only been there for three or four weeks and he got done over. The drains just couldn’t handle it, on top of that we had a river coming down [the street].”
The rise of the ‘build-under’
As the floodwaters came through Brisbane’s older suburbs, the city’s traditional homes – Queenslanders and workers cottages – were in many cases able to allow water to flow underneath the floorboards.
But in recent decades, many people have built rooms underneath these old homes, sometimes raising the old part of the house to allow for a more modern open-plan-living style.
Planning rules in Brisbane do not require a development application to build within the existing envelope of a home; and the “build-under” has allowed many people to add bedrooms – and value – to their property at relatively low cost.
“You can make relatively large increases in size quite quickly by building underneath [the house],” said John Macarthur, a professor of architecture at the University of Queensland.
“There are a lot of structural issues behind this, but the principle one is land value – it’s just skyrocketed.
“Banks and financial institutions will instruct people to capitalise their property at a certain rate. The more land prices go up, the more expensive the buildings have to be, and that’s expressed in size, numbers of rooms, number of car spaces, a lot of things that don’t fit on the lot the house was built for.”
Architect James Davidson, whose practice specialises in climate adaptation and flood resilience, has been working with Brisbane council on a flood resilient homes program for the past few years. He oversaw the renovation of Rusty’s place.
The traditional design of the Queenslander is “not really supportive of family living,” Davidson said.
“The idea of having a separate living room, a separate kitchen, that’s sort of gone out the window. When it comes to Queenslanders, a lot of clients want to put kitchen and living area on the ground level, next to their backyard,” he said.
“The problem we have is that the original Queenslander was built well above a flood line. Building underneath is an affordable approach for a lot of families.
“I’m not that critical of people who build in under, because subconsciously … we think the hard infrastructure will save us. It’s a reminder we can’t trust dams, we can’t trust drainage and pipes.
“So we need to look at accepting water and living with water and making it simple to recover from events like the one we’ve just had.”
Resilience: ‘It’s about people’
So what does “resilience” – this catch-all term tossed about frequently in recent weeks – actually look like? Some talk about raising dams and levees and home buybacks. But in the face of climate change, Davidson said it has to mean more than just physical adaptation.
“Resilience is about community, it’s not about the house,” he said.
“If the asset is good at protecting itself, then the broader thing [is] about being able to assist your community quicker. It’s not about the house at all, it’s about people.
“All councils around the country that are affected by flooding recognise the legacy issue. I don’t blame anybody, nobody predicted we would be facing this level of climate change so quickly – I was personally expecting it to happen another 20 or 30 years.
“There’s legacy issues about developing on a floodplain in the first place. But people don’t want to leave, they really don’t. Talks about buybacks are fraught with emotional drama. It’s problematic. We’re displacing community.”
Davidson said buybacks would need to happen in the longer term – that properties that were acquired could then be used for water flow or retention to mitigate damage at those that remain.
“It needs some thought and an understanding that it’s not just about homes, it’s about livelihoods, economies, culture and education for kids.”
In the meantime, homes could be built or renovated like Rusty’s – using materials that won’t be damaged by floodwaters and can be easily cleaned – so floods don’t displace people in the longer term.
Davidson said it was easy to criticise people who buy or build in a flood zone “when you’re not the one being affected”.
“How do you displace an entire community without losing your sense of belonging?” he said.
“It’s a big conversation that has to be had [about buybacks and climate resilience], but it needs to happen with a bit of thought, a bit of sensitivity.”
