‘It just doesn’t work’: renting in northern NSW is so impossible we’ve had to go off-grid

Anna Glanzen, a single mother who is renting a small plot of land in Mullumbimby that she and her son will live on without power or running water. Photograph: Natalie Grono/The Guardian

Months before thousands of people were left homeless because of unprecedented flooding, rental prices in New South Wales’s northern rivers were surging, largely driven by a pandemic-induced influx of families and young professionals from Sydney and Melbourne.

Anna Glanzen, 40, lives in Mullumbimby.