When the sale of the Selwyn Street boarding houses was completed in 2023, there was an expectation among the residents that the new owner would allow the present occupants to remain in their home.
The emerging realisation soon became apparent: a new purpose was at the centre of the transaction and the collective eviction of all residents was to be the outcome.
The boarding houses were to be closed for redevelopment, an unsettling introduction to an uncertain future.
Accommodation no longer meant tenure with security; it now meant a removal from all that was familiar to the residents. Envisaged was a nowhere of sleeping rough in doorways, alongside the passing foot traffic.
If the developers were to achieve their objective and if the proposal, soon to go before the Land and Environment Court, were to succeed, it would mean less about the knocking out of a few walls and more about the demolition of men’s lives.
Closure and eviction had now become a collision between the present and the future.
Now we were to no longer be hardworking truck drivers, brick layers or the local postie. We were now anonymous; that accompaniment to homelessness had arrived.
Do we discard residents here as obsolete? Are they to live out their future separated, isolated and alone? If so, who are we now as a society? And where do they now fit?
Tsunami of gentrification
The tsunami of Paddington’s gentrification had few rivals anywhere else in Sydney. But that gentrification has coexisted harmoniously with the more straightened boarding house residents for many years now.
A mosaic of varying complexions. A platform of understanding and respect, where diversity is recognised, where, over time, an enclave never developed and integration flourished.
The one-time estranged bricklayer, the retired council worker and the had-enough-of-driving truckie live alongside the finance broker, the advertising executive or the business consultant. They have a couple of beers at the local — that egalitarian leveller and gateway to a recent anecdote or a shared joke.
There was a growing familiarity, sometimes repeated back home over dinner, to be overheard and absorbed by growing children at the table; lessons for them, peeled in real time, that form attitudes.
Should our emerging young adults in the neighbourhood be better served not to be exposed to the variation inherent in our social structure?
Should they be quarantined from the realities of economic levels? Or should they be exposed to a realisation that it is okay to advance in an environment where difference also has dignity? Where those lessons don’t have to be explained but experienced.
Down at this end of the hill, we have never been seen as a cohort of shambolic, unruly disruptors, various shades of grey just to be tolerated or, worse, ignored. House values adjacent to the boarding houses have never eased because of our existence.
Instead, we are seen as a compliment to the changing profile of our community, where the sublime, ridiculous the plain ordinary coexist in a silent conversation of acceptance.
Friendships have been forged from understanding the evenness and leveling, that is the preferred way of life. It is a coat of many colours.
Our neighbours lie somewhere between concerned and outraged at the prospect of our much publicised eviction from our homes. The residents are mindful of this and grateful for their participation in our struggle.
We all look to our legislators to step up and recognise the benefits to the many of what a continuation of the boarding houses would mean that, to us, are apparent.
Residency here has many dimensions of comfort beyond a roof over one’s head and an address for contact.
One aspect worth revealing is that for those in advanced years, it means an understanding which travels a journey; one that arrives at the inevitability that life has a finality.
Here, there are passings. And when someone moves on, there are the same attendant sadnesses experienced by those cohabiting. We are a herd species, too, and a loss for some can be as meaningful as a death that appears in the closest of families.
Here, where family is no longer in the picture, the connections have to be established over time. The trust is generated generally though shared interests. The arrangements are verbal and confined, but still navigated. It could be a wristwatch, a newer television, or merely some tinned food, but the transfer is acknowledged and the preference fulfilled.
However large or small, final wishes are recognised and memories cemented. The outcome carries with it the message of comfort and eases into closure for both. An unnoticed nuance to most, but this is but one small example of why there should be this stratum of accommodation available in society.
As the housing crisis becomes deeper and inevitably more widespread, should we abandon these establishments or preserve them? What should the present viability of these boarding houses be a competitor to?
On the resident’s side of this ledger, we can offer a gross receipt that stands, at present rates, at $350,000 per annum. We can offer a full occupancy based on past experience during a softer accommodation period.
We can offer a well administered, low-maintenance assisted occupancy under fair and compassionate management.
Through the internal in-place network of mutual assistance, we can relieve the burdens on the three tiers of government, especially in the area of health, and maintaining a culture of care and regard as a way of life.
We can still provide the sublime, the ridiculous and the just plain ordinary as our contribution to our neighbours.
Society with values?
Should we not maintain a society comfortable with itself in its values?
Where should the threshold be set before society marginalises the economically exhausted to a life on the street where your name and who you are has no consequence, and the once next-door chat has evaporated because of embarrassment?
Or, do we preserve a community like Selwyn Street, celebrate its successes and advance its contained message?
This is a vibrant, harmonious and stimulating corner of Sydney. A community of many colours. A community proudly expressing its preferences and feelings.
Is the expulsion of the 30 odd well-established, well-intended and the well-regarded residents to become the “New Sydney”?
Residents in boarding houses have scarce protection available to them under state or federal legislation. Any avenues available to us for the purpose of any mediation are absent.
Laws to protect viable boarding houses, like this facility, have not been established by any of the three tiers of government. Therefore, does homelessness now become the other side of a development opportunity?
Do we deny the established residents their future well-being? Do we overrun their existence and disregard their inclusion in this equation?
Do we remove the roof of their lives, replace it with the sleeping bag and direct them to a food-bank queue in perpetuity? If so, what sort of society have we become?
The original owners, the Glanvilles, put the basics of a viable accommodation business in place and got them right all those years ago. Along the way, they maintained the structures and, from experience, established the protocols of a successful accommodation for the residents. Their contribution has some lessons that matter. The protocols they established are still relevant and are needed more than ever in these times.
Thank you for coming and allowing us the opportunity to be heard.
[Barry Skinner is a resident of the Selwyn Street boarding houses. He gave this speech to a protest on February 22, organised by Action for Public Housing.]