In a motel room behind a tavern in Bellingen in mid-northern NSW, single mother Kaila Jobson is trying, so hard.
Boiling up the kettle for hot dogs to feed her kids because she doesn't have a stove, lying awake at night anxious, hoping her crying baby doesn't wake the other motel guests.
Trying to stop her four-year-old from getting ratty when he's watching cartoons on a smartphone while she strips motel room beds.
Putting together futile rental applications, over and over again.
Kaila works six days a week cleaning the motel's rooms and tending the tavern's bar.
She's living here because she says she applied unsuccessfully for about a hundred properties in the gentrified area that was once a fairly sleepy country hamlet.
Now, she has simply nowhere else to go.
People like Kaila present the new face of homelessness and housing stress in Australia.
Regional areas like the surrounding Coffs Coast used to be the sort of places people working in low- to middle-income jobs like hospitality, retail, nursing and aged care could reasonably expect to find a home.
A Four Corners investigation has shown thanks to the critical lack of social and affordable housing, they're not anymore.
"I'm just not letting myself feel anything too much because then it'll just be too much," Kaila says.
"Like, I'll just break down, I won't be able to handle it – and the kids need me to be able to be on top of my game right now.
"So I'll schedule a mental breakdown for later in the year," she jokes, darkly.
Her employers have been kind and supportive – it's now very difficult for businesses in the area to attract staff, given the dearth of housing – and they've given her a discount for three months on a room until she hopefully finds a place.
"[It's] feeling like you're drowning and every single time you can see the surface and you feel like you're just about to break the surface, something grabs your ankle and rips you back down," Kaila says.
"And you've got to try all over again to get back up to that light. But I mean, my kids are definitely worth it, aren't they?" she says, nodding and smiling weakly at baby Alex.
A cleaner and bartender
Kaila was living in a house just outside of Bellingen for several years before the owner put the rent up to a price she could no longer afford — $520 a week when her take-home pay is $750.
The house was also riddled with mould and asbestos and the roof was leaking. She had both children sleeping in her bedroom because the ceiling in her son's room was caving in.
Her pleas to the owner to fix it had fallen on deaf ears.
With several months until the end of the lease, she gave notice, thinking she had plenty of time.
She had a stable job and references.
But finding a property to rent right now is next to impossible.
Rents went up in the Bellingen area by 48 per cent in the year to December 2021 – the highest increase in NSW, as it became a coveted treechange destination during Australia's period of rapid COVID-inspired internal migration.
For context, that's three times higher than the rest of regional Australia in the same period and 16 times higher than the capital cities.
Outside the tavern where Kaila works, a new breed of locals sip lattes, browse artisan homewares, try on expensive clothes.
Meanwhile, the cafes struggle to get staff because it's so hard to find accommodation on a hospitality or retail wage – one of them we visited recently had to close down one day a week for a period because they just couldn't staff it.
"It's just ridiculous," Kaila says.
"There's two-bedroom houses that I remember five years ago being advertised for $350 a week. And now they're $650, $700 a week."
Lisa Hanlan, a real estate agent in nearby Coffs Harbour, feels terrible about how many people she has to turn away each time she lists a property for lease.
"They're really struggling," she says.
"Genuine people are applying for rental properties — they may have good references, they may have income, but they're being declined.
"We've found that we've had doctors, nurses, other professions come into town, looking for accommodation to secure their new placements here.
"If they haven't been able to find accommodation, quite often they have had to pass up that opportunity."
While in the year to August, rents across Australia rose by 10 per cent – a new record high — those in the Coffs Harbour local government area have risen by 26 per cent over the past two years.
The disability support worker
If you're on a low income in the Coffs Coast region and can't find affordable private rental, social housing isn't really an option either.
The wait list, one of the longest in NSW, is more than 10 years.
Despite that desperate need, when local resident Stacey Warn takes us around an estate with predominantly social housing, many homes are sitting empty and have been, she says, for months.
Of those that are occupied, Stacey shows us multiple examples of homes that residents say are dilapidated and over-crowded – there are tarpaulins on roofs to stop leaks, and residents speak of holes in walls, mushrooms growing in carpets, maggots because of sewage leaks.
Stacey says she is constantly cleaning the mould because she has a child with low immunity issues, but it keeps coming back.
She is desperate to get out and should have the means to do it – she works as a disability support worker, has savings and she's articulate, smart and motivated.
But nothing seems to matter – like Kaila Jobson, she says she's unsuccessfully applied for dozens of private rental properties.
"I'm getting to that stage in my life where I can maybe hop out of social housing and let someone else that really needs it come in, but it doesn't matter what I do," Stacey says.
"I work three days a week now and the other three days I do community work. And not only do I enjoy doing my community work that I like helping, I want to be noticed by another level of society for someone to see that I'm trying to better my life," she says.
"I just feel like being a single mum of four kids [in social housing], I just feel like I get looked at and I get characterised."
Stacey begins to cry.
"And it's really unfair, considering I try really hard to get out of that.
"I'm a disability support worker and three of my clients at the moment are also homeless, and they come to me and they say: 'What can we do?'
"And I send them on all the avenues, but deep down in my heart, I know that if I've got no hope, neither do they.
"We're just walking along this journey where it feels like there's no solution."
'Constraints' in the construction sector: Housing Minister
The woman who wants to be part of the solution is new federal Housing Minister Julie Collins.
The government has promised a building plan of 20,000 social and 10,000 affordable housing properties over the next five years – to add to the 15,000 promised by the states.
Like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Ms Collins is one of the few politicians who can truly understand what it's like to be someone like Kaila or Stacey: she also grew up in public housing.
"I know it because I've lived it. I understand how critically important it is, how fundamental it is to be able to have kids go to school, to be able to participate in the workforce," she says.
"Having a home is central to that, to dignity of Australians, which is why we do have an ambitious plan. This is the first time in almost nine years we've got a federal government stepping up to the plate."
The new plan is roughly double the rate of new social housing homes under the life of the previous government.
The overall funding offered to the states each year under the National Homelessness and Housing Agreement has not increased.
In an open letter ahead of the last election, the Australian Council of Social Services and 70 other stakeholders in housing and homelessness argued that the Commonwealth needed to build 25,000 social housing homes every year just to keep up with demand.
"Well, we've got constraints also in the construction sector," Ms Collins said.
"We are trying to move as quickly as we can."
But the dire backlog left by state and federal governments over decades means what's required is roughly triple what is currently promised in combined Commonwealth and state building programs.
Until things drastically change, people like Kaila Jobson around the country will be living in motels, or tents or cars.
"I want people to understand that it's not sustainable to be able to live like this," Kaila says.
"I basically only need a kitchen, a bathroom, and somewhere for the kids to sleep. And that's all I need. And that's all they need.
"And it's just impossible. Like, it's really impossible.
"Something needs to happen where there's not so many people in this position.
"Because it's, yeah, too much."
Story produced in collaboration with ABC Regional Investigations.
Watch Four Corners' full investigation at 8:30 on ABC TV and ABC iview.
