St Kilda Housing - documentary 1991 (SKA TV)

[Music] she changed [Music] silver [Music] here we go [Music] he's taking over and we've only been getting a six month place [Music] she was dancing with stranger [Music] six dancers five dollars [Music] by yourself [Music] unlike they're closing down all the sort of cheap hotels like the regal and majestic and that yeah didn't leave much option really but a lot of people have been forced to leaves and kill them because they can't pay their rents yes yes you know [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] one day a young [Music] used to be considered a very sleazy sort of down market place so rents were cheap there was a very very wide variety of people living in saint kilda saint george has a huge number of rooming houses so we had the traditional rooming house residents plus the cheap rentals meant we had a lot of low-income people what then happened of course was the developers moved in and decided that saint killed her being what's up close to the city it's on the seaside they decided that saint kilda could be like double bay in sydney uh this used to be you know block of flats where elderly people used to live how do you feel about that um well i just sort of like the idea that they're starting to utilise our beach areas and stuff i think it's really good what's happening instant gilda jeff's really just a reflection of what's already happened to most of the inner suburbs of melbourne and that in turn's a reflection of a an international trend really that uh wealthier people are moving into the inner suburbs the inner areas of um big cities all over the world used to be such a grotto supplies you know they don't want it like that anymore you don't want money it's all about money you've got your steady process of gentrification where houses that may have been previously tenanted get renovated and sold and owner occupied the same thing with flats especially with strata titling where a block of flats which was previously all rented if that's divided up into the flats each being one on one title you can then get um a massive profit by just doing a bit of renovation and meeting certain fire standards the owner or developer can then sell them all off as individual units st kilda office has a strata title project which is an ongoing local campaign what we do is we get the register and we find out who has applied to have their property assessed when we've got the information on the name of the property we then have a leaflet that was specially drawn up for this project and we leaflet all the residents of that property and what that basically tells them is it tells them what rights they have often what happens is because the developers want to make as much money as they can they leave the tenants in there they do the development and the renovations around the tenants and then they give them a 60-day notice when they've sold the property so basically there's usually a 60-day settlement period so the tenants are there right up until the final day when the new owner moves in unfortunately this means that a lot of tenants are left without water they have sewage problems you know they often have walls being knocked out and they're actually flat and we try and help those tenants first they get the restraining order which means getting an urgent tribunal hearing and then we help them apply for compensation afterwards unfortunately there isn't much we can do to help them relocate [Music] about uh 10 years ago i think it became very apparent to both citizen kill the council and to a number of residents in the community that the decline of affordable housing in the area was having very dramatic consequences on a number of residents in the area particularly those renting and those on lower to middle incomes instant kilda has traditionally been a um you know a place for uh people of low income i mean i was born in this suburb and uh you know now i can't eat i can barely afford to live here i live in a block of flats of 10 people and i'm i'm a worker i actually go and work for a living where [Music] i'm not saying they're not working but they're doing a different sort of living and that's the only way they can survive i mean the areas for everyone and so i guess it's pretty multicultural and sort of very cultural as well so excluding low-income people i mean isn't beneficial i guess events are going up very quickly much quicker than incomes are especially fixed incomes like pensions and benefits so people are gradually going to housing-related poverty and their rent is something they can't sacrifice so they usually cut back on on food on entertainment on on clothing and gradually become poorer and poorer and more impoverished in the i noticed the process of um one bedroom flats has gone up a fair bit yeah it's nearly impossible to live on your own now they're all paying 100 to sleep by yourself you can get a rent increase on a property once every six months you only have to get 60 days written notice that's two months but there's no limit on how much they can increase the rent it's market value so what has happened in saint kilda is even people who have been living in places where the landlord hasn't come near the place or an effect as a single repair they find that if they complain about their rent increase the inspector might come out and sure the inspectors take into account the number of repairs the state of repair of the property but given that the market rents in their area are so high they still find that the rent increase is judged to be not excessive or if it is judged to be excessive it's only ten dollars in excess of what it should be economically that's just the way it is nowadays you know if you haven't got the money you can't afford to live here that's as simple as that i don't live in saint kilda at some stage we will get we will reach the limit of of required rooming houses but i would say it's not for many years as yet because synkilda is a uh not so much a transit but a people are attracted to it and they like to live here it's plenty of transport and the the whole aspect of it is that uh rooming rooming houses are essential the sinclair rooming house issues group was formed basically to manage this house was apparently pretty rough sort of place where the ministry did buy it was one of the earliest places bought sometime in the early 80s i found a good um busy young having a low income which the um which uh social security uh provides so it's the best best available i used to have a house around the house in a catalog street san gilda my family are very good and i'm one of the of the first ones i'm one of the testaments will to be here in our family very much very much good no complaints we have a number of people who come here who are being evicted there are two types of eviction there's legal evictions and then there's also illegal evictions the most common that we have here is where people turn up with a 14-day notice to vocate for rent arrears what happens is when people are 14 days behind in their rent this is if they're covered by the residential tenancies act they can be given a 14-day notice to vacate for the arrears now a lot of people think that they have to go then and and they move out but a few other people ring their agent they've had a problem they've lost their job something else has happened and they find the agents are very unhelpful in a lot of the cases and so they come here and ask if there's anything that we can do i have known some friends who've been evicted yeah usually illegally um through tricks but uh i mean uh basically it boils down to the fact that landlords and owners think they can get more money so they kick somebody out slap a coat of paint on double the rent and they get it do you see people have been evicted oh yeah all the time every day myself many years have been trying to get me out of the place but i'm still here yeah that's bad news you know halloween plus you've got the copper's hassle on you and all that [ __ ] you know what i mean yeah it's happening all the time people getting phone outlet for one center where you meant they're gay no way these people can't help but they help you half point but you know they don't really help you that much yeah yeah that's it what can be done you told me that you've been there five years that your job's casual that you got behind in rent you're only one month behind and what you say to the tribunal is that you're well now unfortunately some landlords don't realize that they can't just throw someone out of their house that you can't be evicted unless you have a warrant a position which is executed by the police um so sometimes people turn up here and tell us that oh they've gone home all their property's on the front veranda often this is because they are in arrears of rent but sometimes it's not it's just that the landlord has decided to get them out um and then we can help them by getting them to get an urgent hearing at the tribunal they can often be reinstated into the premises if there's arrears that can be sorted out they can come to some agreement and also they can get compensation for [Music] that [Music] [Music] although there's no it's still structurally sound uh it's looking a bit teddy around the edges now what they wanted to do was put a massive development on this in about the mid 80s about an 18 story block that would be high cost apartments offices and and an art gallery and restaurant down the bottom um local residents really jacked up about that and that along with the esplanade hotel plans um was one of the reasons why the turn the tide group got into power on council and groups like saves and killed are formed and um everyone in in singular like the tenants union and the people that worked at the salvos just all ganged up together and said hey this has got to stop um so about 200 300 people um got very active we started holding meetings we started lobbying the local council we started lobbying state politicians we had petitions we had stalls outside we had banners on the building we got a lot of you know media coverage and from there it became a much sort of broader movement of people interested in the issues and not just the particular buildings we then decided right we're going to campaign on council we're going to put objections in as much as we can and there was a big swing at the next council elections and quite a few turn the tide candidates got on the state government saw that and they imposed an eight-story height limit right along the upper esplanade here so that was one big victory for starters [Music] [Music] you can see across to the city and until i asked to leave i didn't really a lot of them didn't know how well they had it so it was a big very depressing i think uh so much so that um well all right mr khan had a trouble with his heart but this didn't help them either no and i guess for a lot of the older ones it was that sense of community well that's a typical example of planning by neglect allowing the owner to neglect the properties to the point where he can apply for a demolition permit i think that he should be penalized a percentage value of the property for allowing that property to to get to that state those hotels up the top of fitzroy street that were once providing accommodation for low-income people and now they're all closed while people are going homeless on the streets did you know that one person owns all four hotels yeah i did i did hear that and i heard that they demolished they were applying to demolish them yeah uh green something or other you hear a lot about a lot of property owners just leaving their buildings derelict so that they can um demolish them well i was living at the majestic when they told us we couldn't live there because there was a fire hazard so they kicked us all out and since then not all the efforts of the arsonist and some cooler have managed to burn it down this is called club one um this ended up as a compromise after there were some horrendous development proposals in the um mid-80s talking about uh 20-story or 24-story developments on this site now this is eight stories and have a look at the size of that it's just grotesque and i mean you can see what local people think of it just notice a few broken windows there as we came around yeah well i mean one can't condone sort of illegal destruction of property but on the other hand the fact that it happens is just an expression of um locals dislike of the building i mean it just is so out of character here it's really sterile and we've sort of tried to make it a little bit uh architecturally you know friendly but it's just not it's just some enslaves what do you think of the club one hotel do you know the one up on it doesn't look very nice actually the architect could have done a better job but i mean it might bring in good tourism condominium type yeah i mean the venue's gone i think you know as part of those sort of rock venues are going but um i think it's a quite attractive looking building yeah this building might be a bit ready but it's still a great example of the 30s deco architecture that makes some kilder interesting while you have a look at that monstrosity up there and if that's in keeping with some kilda's character with its deco motifs and its little turret up there then i'll eat my hat but i don't mind tourists sort of coming in but i mean i don't like to see the way that uh secured is changing a lot of the development i think they should try and keep as much of the character of some kilda as possible do you think more could be done too absolutely yeah there should be a lot more uh public participation and i think the council should get their act together you know architecturally the st kilda council has tried to buy and develop quite a lot of estates or blocks of flats or whatever and make them public housing for long-term traditional residents not always elderly people but the rest of them just have to leave it's called the linkage program and what they do is link development to provision of human services social services the the scheme works in terms of any development that goes ahead or is approved the developers have to pay a fee per square foot that fee is then used to provide housing within the municipality that could be adapted to the australian conditions the good thing about it i suppose is that what it's doing is making developers pay for the benefit of the infrastructures that are already there following council's decision not to try to control subdivisions we did decide that a long-term strategy would be to find ways in which to encourage developers through a mixture of controls and incentives to provide affordable rental housing that has been a phenomenon which australia has done very badly at well you know just all around where we are all the flats are sort of being renovated and it's just you know i think a lot of people are sort of moving out and other people coming in and it's really sad so we love living here it's great innocent killed i don't think we've we've got the same sort of problem as some of the outer urban municipalities have we are very much supporting medium density housing the case of the the venue site is a good one it's a site that council owned it wasn't used for residential purposes we sold it to the minister of housing after a tender process and they're going to build a seven seven-story block of elderly persons units and that's an example of how we're trying to increase the density of housing so that more people can enjoy the sorts of qualities that are in secure and to maintain the the um proportion of residences in the municipality in the inner suburbs of melbourne you've got a pub on every corner you've got cafes you've got life if there's a hotel being developed or being built in a condition of approval for for a permit to build a hotel then perhaps a percentage of the rooms should be allowed for low-income earners what's happening now is that there have been all of these delays which we created um that we argued needed to be in place so that people could consider the issues now that the economy has um taken this sort of downward dive nobody can do anything anyway which means that it's a good time to really examine what the planning implications are what the implications of these appeals are and what kind of city we want here and what kind of development we want here then closed down moved away thanks to the fire department and other regulations and developers same old story what can be done about it um change of attitude in the general public i suppose a bit more support people don't understand basically people don't care as long as they're okay the tenants union has campaigned for some time to have only just cause evictions which means you can only evict someone for a reason currently there's a six month notice to vacate for no reason um so i guess the tenants union work is very very important and it's becoming more so given that there's this huge increase in the number of people who will be renting for the rest of their lives you can't expect someone to live in in crappy conditions and i think that in some kilda they expect them to and charge a fortune for them i think it's improving all the time i think development's good for the area oh yeah it's cleaned up a lot too i think it's changed for the worse you know i think uh governments and local councils should have a look at their priorities in terms of what they really want whether they want a community or they they want a shopping mall no i'm in a position where i can't really afford to to buy a place down here by my own place so i'm just sort of one of those people who has to rent and and you know local people can organize and there are various groups around but like they're up against um an infrastructure that's very strong it will get to the stage where a lot of us can do something about it though because i want to stay here i mean i'm really that's it for me i want to stay here forever i don't want to move say curious i wonder here to live and you can't blame it he'll other people want to live here and you know it's um and uh you know want to move in here and live and so things go up i mean it's um but there has to be that balance as well you know

Channel: Mike Collins

Views: 1,542

Keywords: St Kilda, Melbourne, community tv, public tv, SKA TV, St Kilda History, Urban History, Tenants Union, Save St Kilda, Housing History, housing, urban renewal, Gentrification, Activism

Id: 62-EAEJhPbc

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020