There Goes The Neighbourhood

Eleanor Simpson is not a dirty person but her flat stinks. She’s not
antisocial, either, but a note taped to her front door tells people that
if she’s not expecting them, there’s not a chance she’ll let them in.
Eleanor Simpson is 67 years old and lives on the 15th floor of a Redfern
apartment block. It could be heaven. “I see Botany Bay off the balcony,
I see Darling Harbour to my right and on a clear day sometimes the
mountains, the sunsets and the moon.”

And look at the phrases real-estate agents use to describe
the area: “superb locale”, “prime city-fringe location”, “enviable
lifestyle pocket”. They’re not phrases Simpson would use to describe her
world. She lives in a Housing NSW tower in a development that some ’60s
bureaucrat with a lousy sense of humour named Poets Corner, and here
life can be hell. The stench: her flat has been flooded twice in two
years thanks to the 46-year-old block’s dodgy plumbing, most recently in
June. Touch her flat’s carpet and it’s still damp. Mould everywhere,
rotting boards in her kitchen cupboards. “I open them, I could vomit;
I’ve had bugs that I’ve never seen in me life before,” says Simpson.
Housing NSW hasn’t rushed to fix things.

And the fear: druggies on every floor, encounters with the
psychotic and the stoned in grim corridors and frightful lifts. Simpson,
tiny and in terrible health, was bashed one afternoon downstairs near
the Poets Corner shop. “They came from behind and knocked me down.”
Barbara, her elderly friend on the eighth floor, barely leaves her flat
now. “God love her, she’s so paranoid; she absolutely loathes having to
leave her place for what she might come in contact with in the hallway
and every five minutes she’s checking her spy hole.”

Once, Simpson’s little one-bedroom flat with her crazy
collection of frogs on every surface – ceramic, fur, knitted – was her
castle. “I used to be as happy as the pig in the proverbial,” she says.
But for public-housing tenants such as Simpson, things have changed
around here. Over the past few years, they’ve been hit with a double
whammy: a severe decline in the quality of their homes as Housing NSW
properties have aged and maintenance has been neglected, and a massive
increase in the number of bad neighbours.

Simpson’s is not the only world to be changing: these days,
when she tends the plants on her little balcony, the landscape she looks
across is one transformed. In only a few years, one of Australia’s most
infamous areas has altered at an unprecedented pace. Today, it’s a
place of fat real-estate prices, hipsters and the affluent, cafes and
small bars, artisanal bakeries selling $7 loaves of bread, farmers’
markets, chic apartment blocks, designer dogs and all the joys of
gentrification, spreading from Waterloo south of Phillip Street, across
to Redfern Station and beyond to Eveleigh and CarriageWorks.

But this is the story of two very different worlds. “Danks
Street is absolutely brilliant; bloody expensive, mind, not for poor
buggers like us,” says Simpson of the strip of cafes and galleries a few
minutes’ walk from Poets Corner. Simpson didn’t need any help from the
cool vintage-furniture shops on Regent Street to achieve the retro feel
in her kitchen. Indeed, it seems some sort of cruel dig that as the
Redfern/Waterloo area has been prettied up, the circumstances of its
estimated 6000 public-housing residents – about a quarter of the
population – have become uglier.

Ugly, too, are the implied sneers from those who have moved
into the neighbourhood: as when SBS newsreader and resident Ricardo
Goncalves announced in April that he thought his part of Redfern – the
eastern side of the suburb that includes the refined apartment
development Moore Park Gardens – should be renamed South Dowling to
remove it from the stigma still attached to Redfern. Or in the glib tags
“Murder Mall” or “Methadone Mall”, which some use to describe the
shopping centre on the corner of Baptist and Cleveland streets. (Its
name was changed from Redfern Mall to the more salubrious Surry Hills
Shopping Village in the early 1990s.) Or in the comments of pub
entrepreneur Jaime Wirth, who took over Cleveland Street’s Norfolk Hotel
in late 2010, telling a website that he wanted to transform the “derro
pokie pub” into one “full of friendly people eating a pint of prawns or
soft-shell tacos and drinking Pimm’s jugs”.

It’s all a lot to stomach for the old-timers but the change
has barely started. The population has leapt since 2006 (in Waterloo
it’s up by 25 per cent) and it’s estimated it will almost double again
over the next two decades. The once-wretched Block is now an expanse of
lawn that will become the Pemulwuy development, including a planned 62
apartments for Aboriginal families, accommodation for 154 students, and
commercial and retail space. But Pemulwuy is a minnow: it’s the state
government’s renewal plans for its Redfern/Waterloo property portfolio –
estimated to be about a third of the area – that will drastically alter
the two suburbs’ physical shape and the fabric of their communities
over the next 25 years.

In Macquarie Street offices, ministers and bureaucrats are
poring over blueprints that will add 3500 new units of housing – a 60:40
mix of private and public (now called “social” housing) – to Housing
NSW estates in Redfern, Waterloo and Eveleigh. The government says the
plans will result in a more balanced mix of social, private and
affordable housing and a more sustainable community. Some, though,
predict that the area’s diversity and character will be replaced by a
panorama of cookie-cutter apartment complexes for yuppies. Others fear
the plans will widen the already stark division between the new and the
old worlds, the haves and the have-nots.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” says local resident Ross Smith,
68, who has lived in a low-rise Waterloo walk-up since he could get a
beer at his local for ninepence. “[It will be] an entirely different
landscape. You’ll see high-density residential property in which the
existing [public housing] community will have a very diminished or
non-existent role. It’s the end of the community of this area.”

Millie Ingram remembers seeing Elvis Presley in Loving You
at the Lawson Theatre in Botany Road. She also remembers the nearby
Palms milk bar, which was run by a lovely old Greek bloke and had a
jukebox. “We weren’t allowed in hotels,” says Ingram, a feisty Wiradjuri
woman who heads Wyanga Aboriginal Community Aged Care Program.

In the late ’50s, Ingram came from Cowra to the city for
work. In an area full of factories, including the massive Eveleigh
locomotive and carriage workshop, she found that easily enough – at a
local chocolate factory. As an Aborigine, though, finding somewhere to
live was harder. “We finally got a squalid little attic room, my sister
and I, just opposite Redfern Park.” With the factories had come the
tenements housing thousands: the unemployed and the alcoholic, labourers
and factory workers. Violence and crime, ragged, neglected children.

A decade or so before Ingram arrived in Redfern, the local
council had declared its intentions to turn its “blighted drabness” into
a “model suburb”. It would be “the Mayfair of Sydney”, boasted a Sydney Morning Herald
article in August 1949, which was accompanied by an illustration
pointing out where the suburb’s opera house and national theatre would
go.

The first bulldozers moved into slums off Cleveland Street
late in 1947; two years later, work started on the first of the Housing
Commission’s new walk-up apartments. The area’s first tower block, the
McKell building, started to go up in 1963.

When the Housing Commission announced in 1972 that it would
resume Waterloo homes in a new round of slum clearances, the area’s era
as a battleground started. Locals reacted with fury. They wanted
rehabilitation, not demolition and displacement of their community.
There were protests and picket lines, green bans, forced evictions and
arrests.

Battles in Redfern and Waterloo have not always been so
overt. Resident Geoff Turnbull, who for years has been a key member of
the REDWatch community group, tells the story of a long-standing
community centre that owns several properties in one street. As the area
gentrified, some residents of the street started to fret about the
effect the centre and the Aboriginal children who used it were having on
their property prices. “They basically infiltrated and took control of
the organisation and, in 2004, tried to sell it off,” says Turnbull, who
paid $26,920 for his Lawson Street terrace in 1978.

Ingram describes Redfern as “our Anzac Cove”. “We lost a lot
of warriors there,” she says. To ill-health, stress-related conditions
resulting from “the struggle”, alcohol and drugs. It’s “the blackfellas’
graveyard”, says Mick Mundine, the head of the Aboriginal Housing
Company. The area’s history as a national focal point for the Aboriginal
struggle is well known: the “sad affair” of the Block. The night of
rioting in 2004 after the death of Thomas “TJ” Hickey, who died when he
came off his bike and was impaled on a fence; the youth was, some
believe, pedalling to escape police. Mundine’s own tour of duty has
lasted 30 years; he’s seen off countless foes, including some within the
Aboriginal community who opposed the demolition of the Block. (It might
be appropriate that the Pemulwuy development is named for an Aboriginal
warrior but Mundine’s campaign for $70 million in funds and planning
approval still has a way to run.)

But perhaps the most vicious battles in the area now are
those the drug-affected and addicted wage on themselves and their
community. Since the Block’s demise, the drug problem, increasingly ice,
has slithered into the public-housing areas. Eleanor Simpson encounters
the screaming, the raging, the tormented every time she leaves her
tower flat. “The druggies all stick together and there’s not one floor
that’s exempt,” she says. “Nobody’ll come and visit me any more because
they hate getting into the lifts and being accosted.”

Dry Land Bar in Redfern Street does a
cheeseburger with a whole pickle at the side and house-made pork
scratchings. In Regent Street, where retro furniture shops sell $5500
mid-century modern chairs, the new Milk Bar by Cafe Ish has a lolly
counter, a jukebox and serves “Ai’s freaking awesome chicken wings”. At
the Norfolk Hotel in Cleveland Street, old tin cans serve as cutlery
holders, tacos take top billing on the menu and there’s a portrait of
the Virgin Mary in the bathroom. Redfern the hipster playground delights
in its irreverent, ironic sense of humour; the eccentric, the
whimsical.

In Redfern Park, where Paul Keating delivered his famous 1992
speech (“We simply cannot sweep injustice aside”), there’s often a pet
pig on a leash. His name is James. His owner, local student Anna
Furlong, walks him or her dad, Patrick, does. “He’s like a politician –
he doesn’t do much and grunts a lot,” says Patrick Furlong.

On Redfern Street, there’s a giraffe. The giraffe came from
Melbourne Zoo (after apparently dying of natural causes) and has a price
tag of $35,000. “Every day, ad nauseam,” says Ken Wallis of the
questions customers ask about the taxidermied torso, which sits on the
counter of Seasonal Concepts, his florist/vintage store. (Look for
Wallis’s taxidermy props in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.)
“Divine, stunning, divine,” says a customer as she strolls around the
crammed-to-the-rafters shop one Saturday morning. She chooses some
flowers, then remembers, “I want something little for the powder room as
well.”

In 2006, attracted by the “virgin ground”, Wallis spent
$570,000 on 122 Redfern Street. He knew it was a risk. Dozens of Redfern
shops were empty and, after hours, the steel shutters banged down. But
his investment soon started to look like a smart move: the Eveleigh
Farmers’ Market started at CarriageWorks, the Roll-Up Redfern campaign
was launched to persuade shop owners to ditch the shutters, the last
terrible houses on the Block were demolished, and Redfern Park got a
$32-million makeover. In 2011, film producers moved in, turning the
Block into Darlinghurst circa 1927 for scenes in Underbelly: Razor. (This year, film crews for Redfern Now, Blackfella Films’ television series for the ABC about urban indigenous life, and the feature film Around the Block, starring Hollywood actor Christina Ricci, have rubbed elbows in the area.)

Then there are the property prices. Australian Property
Monitors statistics show the median price for a house in Redfern is
$830,000 with a long-term annual growth rate of about 6.55 per cent
compared to 5.54 per cent for the region. But David Servi, director of
Crown Street agent Spencer & Servi, says the statistics don’t tell
the full story as large homes in Redfern rarely go on the market. People
simply don’t want to leave. “People just love the sense of community.”
Servi, who in August sold a four-bedroom terrace at 101 Great Buckingham
Street for $1.2 million, is blunt when clients say they don’t want
Redfern. “I say, ‘Well, you obviously haven’t been there then.’ ”

In 2010, Today show presenter Ben Fordham spent $1
million-plus on a contemporary terrace in Wells Street with timber
floors recycled from a bowling alley and a built-in garden bed on his
balcony where he grows beetroot, carrots and rocket. “I’ve completely
fallen in love with Redfern,” says Fordham. “My wife isn’t convinced but
I’ve said to her, ‘Look, I think we’re here for life now.’ I just love
its attitude; I reckon you can walk 500 metres to Surry Hills and notice
the difference – people actually say ‘hello’ to you in Redfern.”

For those with income or a property foothold in the suburb,
the area’s gentrification is something to celebrate. With her architect
husband, Peter, Lord Mayor Clover Moore moved into “the dearest little
house” at 817 Bourke Street in 1976 and later bought a property across
the back lane in Kepos Street. Since her days as a young mother pushing a
pram around the “bleak” streets of Redfern and collecting signatures
for a petition about speeding traffic, Moore has been a cheerleader for
the area. “The Redfern story is a very joyful story,” she says. “Cafe
life, street life, is terrific. It makes it much safer and builds
community.”

Some might also use the word “joyful” to describe the strides
the local Aboriginal community has taken, especially since the opening
of the gleaming National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in George
Street.

Three mornings a week at 6am up to 70 people pull on boxing
gloves for a training session in the centre’s gym. Among them,
Superintendent Luke Freudenstein, commander of the Redfern Local Area
Command, Aboriginal leader Shane Phillips, police officers, Caucasian
locals and Aboriginal kids who have been in trouble or are at risk of
it. For an hour they’re hard at it: boxing combinations, push-ups,
sprints. Afterwards, some of the kids might go to chat with Freudenstein
in his office at Redfern station. “They’re my guests,” says the
superintendent, who talks to them about footy, boxing, what’s happening
at home. “I want the police to see they’re welcome.”

It’s all part of a court-recognised program designed to bring
discipline and routine to the lives of the kids. Since it started in
2009, robbery rates in the area are down and optimism is up.
Freudenstein has become an unlikely local hero. Jacob Saunders, a
19-year-old Aboriginal man who has seen some trouble in his life and who
now mentors his younger brothers, adores him. “His generosity to us is
unbelievable,” says Saunders, who was born in Taree and came to the
Block with his mum when he was six weeks old.

It hasn’t been an easy life for the young man, seeing things
that kids shouldn’t see, the hardship, the violence. “We all have our
battle scars,” Saunders says. But things are different in Redfern now.
No one treats him as though they’re too good for him, he can walk into
shops without feeling shopkeepers are watching him, and he wants
everyone to feel welcome, to know that Redfern’s not the place they
might think it is. “I can walk through Redfern with my head high because
that’s where I’m from, that’s my dirt, that’s my land, that’s a part of
my heart.”

Eleanor Simpson moved into public housing
after her health collapsed. She’d been a nanny, worked in Double Bay and
Darling Point. Then, in 1986, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Doctors told her she might not make it. Two years later they told her
she had uterine cancer. “I couldn’t afford to pay rent, health
insurance, I had to hock my jewellery; oh, what I had to do,” says
Simpson, who now gets a pension of about $375 a week, about $85 of which
goes on rent.

She’s a diabetic and has diverticulitis – “I’ve been fighting
for three years to keep my colon.” Since the floods in her flat she’s
had chest infections and, in 2011, spent two days in hospital after what
she describes as a “total stress attack”. “In three years, five people
have jumped off balconies here,” she says.

A Housing NSW spokesperson told the(sydney)magazine
that, after both floods, water had been extracted from the flat and work
to replace her kitchen bench-top and cupboards is scheduled for
September.

“Increasingly, disadvantage in Redfern-Waterloo is confined
to what happens in the public-housing estates,” says REDWatch’s Geoff
Turnbull. It’s the result, he says, of the NSW government’s lack of
investment in property and maintenance over a long period of time and of
a shortage in public housing.

Public-housing tenant and canny observer Ross Smith recalls
when people were proud to live in the public housing. “It was socially
mixed, civilised, a functioning community; it wasn’t a leper colony,”
says Smith, who was a travelling carnival worker when he moved into
Waterloo in the early 1960s. He says that, since 2005, the only new
tenants to move into the area’s public housing have been those with high
needs – the unstable mentally ill straight out of psychiatric
institutions who forget to take their pills, troublemakers out of jail –
and they’re not getting the support they need to be functional
residents. “It’s gone past the tipping point; now the tenant body is
predominantly high needs.”

According to a Housing NSW spokesperson, a number of
measures, including block concierges and organised social activities for
the over 50s, have been put in place to deal with the increasing number
of tenants with complex needs.

For activist residents such as Ross Smith, even as they
grapple with such pressing issues, it’s impossible not to see the future
through the prism of the government’s urban-renewal plans for the area.
For a month in early 2011, locals got a glimpse of the Draft
Redfern-Waterloo Built Environment Plan Stage 2 (BEP2) and were able to
comment. It’s likely that before the end of the year the new “planning
controls” will be finalised and exhibited before being formally
gazetted.

For residents, many of whom are elderly and vulnerable,
there’ll be enormous disruption and displacement – under the plans, 700
units of public housing will be lost from the area and relocated to
other parts of the City of Sydney. Submissions from organisations such
as Shelter NSW have raised concerns including whether the relocation of
so many tenancies is even possible given the scarcity of public land in
the inner city.

BEP2 also proposes that buildings of up to
12 storeys could replace the current public-housing walk-ups dotted
around the suburbs. Some, including Geoff Turnbull, believe the walk-ups
will be demolished to make way for developers to build apartments for
the private housing market. He speculates that, in the worst-case
scenario, all the area’s public housing could be confined to the
existing towers, which will be retained, and in proposed “infill”
developments around their bases – where there is open space and car
parking – exacerbating the ghetto effect.

Many have suspicions about the NSW government’s underlying
agenda. “It’s about the government trying to get the best return that it
can from its landholding,” says Turnbull. Clover Moore, whose council
has no remit over the renewal, says social problems and drug dealing
were the original reason the Carr Labor government created the place
management authority, the Redfern-Waterloo Authority (subsumed into the
Sydney Metropolitan Development Authority [SMDA] in 2010). “What
happened … they then looked at the area and thought … ‘Ooo, we own
quite a lot of property here, perhaps this is potential development.’ I
feel very disillusioned about it because it was really meant to be about
addressing the social issues.”

Moore’s concerns will not be allayed by the SMDA’s response to two direct questions from the(sydney)magazine
about the future of the walk-ups and the government’s agenda for the
area: “One of the SMDA’s priorities [is] working with all stakeholders
to deal with a range of issues and facilitating improvement. Significant
progress has been made … in dealing with a number of social and
development issues in the area,” an SMDA spokesperson said.

And it seems some would like to sweep the public-housing
community under the carpet. When the Roll Up Redfern group commissioned
“ideas studio” Frost Design to develop a Redfern brand, its 61-page
presentation document directly mentioned the area’s public-housing
presence only once – as one of the negative perceptions of the area.

Others, though, are keen to emphasise that public-housing
residents are part of the broader community. “People in public housing
can use all the same facilities that people in private housing use,”
says Clover Moore. Seasonal Concepts’ Ken Wallis objects to what he
thinks is an artificial division in the area; the perception of welfare
and non-welfare. “I don’t like the imposition of the ‘us and them’; it
implies this sense of conflict. On the street I don’t get any sense of
that at all. It’s almost like it’s applied from outside.” Wallis, who
walks his Great Danes in the park twice a day, says the way locals mix
is exemplified by dog owners in the park. “They’re out of the towers,
they’re out of various degrees of wealth … They’re all utilising the
facility and getting on.”

Rosa Meza doesn’t have a dog and can’t afford to go to cafes.
Since 1989 she has lived in a three-storey walk-up on Elizabeth Street.
“There is a little bit of a divide, I think, because I’m only engaged
with people who live in the housing,” says Meza, an elegant 50-year-old
who applied for housing after she split with her partner and spent four
years moving with her little girl between rented rooms and friends’
couches. She’s nervous about the future – she thinks she’s in denial
about what the renewal might mean for her – and shakes her head at how
her community has changed. “Sometimes you see young people wearing,
like, cool clothes [like street people] … It’s a bit bizarre … You
have one lot of people spending hundreds of dollars to get a particular
look and they’re living among people who have that look anyway.” A visit
to a cafe is a luxury for Meza, who earns about $500 a week teaching
English to migrants; $145 of that goes to Housing NSW for rent. At Baffi
& Mo cafe in Redfern Street, she looks at the menu and remarks,
“It’s a bit expensive.”

Cafe society gone mad: “Salon and cafe coming soon,” says a
sign on the window of an old barbershop on Cleveland Street, a couple of
old barbers’ chairs inside amid building rubble; the Bourke Street
corner store, where a kindly Egyptian woman once served, now a cafe;
another barbershop on Redfern Street, a cafe; the Lebanese pastry shop
on Cooper Street that sold semolina cakes and date-filled pastries,
empty, a-cafe-in-waiting.

“One of the fears of public tenants is that there’ll be lots
of places to buy $7 cups of coffee but there won’t be places to be able
to get your cheap services,” says Geoff Turnbull. “Look at Roger the
shoe-repair guy. He basically charges people what he thinks that they
can afford. He owns the place and when he goes, no one else is going to
be able to do that. It’s going to become another cafe.”

And what about the people? The real people who live here.
Like Russ, an old guy who’s the only one drinking in the public bar of
the Norfolk one afternoon as hipsters charge past to the beer garden.
He’s boring the barmaid to tears. “Same conversation as yesterday,
exactly the same,” she moans to a co-worker after he leaves. Or Norrie,
the androgynous anarchist who lives in a run-down terrace near the Block
with the word “Love” on the balcony and rides a push bike with a
machine on the back that blows out bubbles. Or Mary, the intellectually
disabled woman who has a chocolate milkshake every day at Redfern
Street’s Purple Goanna cafe where there’s roo, croc, emu and barra on
the menu and everybody feels welcome.

And what about housing tenants like Eleanor Simpson, who is
shrinking in on herself, into her damp, smelly flat. Sometimes she’ll
venture out for a walk. “I’ll leave here and I’ll walk all the way down
to Danks and further … and the developments … oh my godfather, and
we’re just left out of it. You know, we are really left out of it.”

For her birthday last year, Eleanor Simpson and six of her
friends went to the Norfolk Hotel for lunch. “I mean it was okay,” she
says, “but it’s lost its character.”

Photography
/ Stephanie Wood

Source: the(sydney)magazine Issue no. 113 September 2012 pub 31 August 2012 – http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/there-goes-the-neighbourhood-20120827-24vnk.html – for scanned copy of the printed article which has some additional photos see –  There Goes The Neighbourhood – Sydney Magazine pdf