Photo Above: Tenants of Sydney’s Selwyn Street boarding houses and their supporters resist a developer’s moves to evict them.
Photo: Petition · Save our Boarding Houses. Protect our neighbours from homelessness. – Sydney, Australia · Change.org

Stop the Destruction of
Low-Rent Housing in Sydney!

28 December 2024 – Soaring rents and the shortage of affordable rental homes are driving millions of working-class people in Australia into poverty. A large number of people are being forced to skip meals and put off essential medical and dental treatment just to pay the rent. Walk around Sydney – not only within the city but in the suburbs – and it is unmistakable that more and more people are being pushed into homelessness. With wait times for what is left of public housing so long and many who need such housing unable to even get on the wait list, boarding houses – rental accommodation where large numbers of people share kitchen, toilet and lounge facilities – have played a role in providing modest accommodation for some of those who would otherwise be on the streets. However, even here the landlords are jacking up rents. Worse still, many low-income boarding house residents have been evicted as a result of greedy developers converting boarding houses into luxury dwellings that are completely unaffordable for the former tenants. Such eviction is what the residents of boarding houses in Selwyn Street in the inner city Sydney suburb of Paddington are facing today. This follows the purchase of the four buildings last year by LFD Developments (LFDD). Owned by a Sydney capitalist, LFDD is intent on making big bucks by converting the boarding houses that accommodated 32 men into just four luxury apartments intended for eight people. Two months ago, the developer sent tenants eviction notices ordering them to leave by February 1. But 26 people remain right now, overwhelmingly single, aged pensioners.

If the evictions are not stopped, it will be a disaster for the, mostly elderly, tenants – many of whom suffer from serious physical and/or mental health conditions (including the effects of strokes and multiple heart attacks). They will have almost zero hope of finding other affordable rental accommodation in the private rental market. According to the annual snapshot analysis performed by Anglicare, during the weekend of 16-17 March 2024, just three out of the 10,160 private rentals advertised in the entire Greater Sydney and Illawarra area could be affordable for a single person on the aged pension! Moreover, any Selwyn Street boarding house tenants who somehow manage to find suitable accommodation elsewhere surely won’t be able to find it in their current local area. According to the Domain real estate website, the median rent for a one bedroom unit in Paddington is today a whopping $623 per week. For the elderly, Selwyn Street boarding house residents who have lived in these buildings for between 10 to 56 years, any move away from the local area will be painfully disorientating. Having developed friends, support networks and familiarity with their current area, being thrown far away from home at their age and with their health conditions will be traumatic. That is if they manage to find any accommodation anywhere that they can afford! A few will probably be able to secure public housing – and even then that will mean keeping out other people desperate for affordable rental accommodation who are already on the waiting list. But the sad reality in the context of Australia’s rental affordability crisis is that, if the evictions go ahead, at least some of the elderly men will end up being forced to sleep on the streets or in parks. And that is outrageous!

However, the Selwyn Street boarding house residents, their friends in the local area, concerned local residents and others opposed to throwing vulnerable, elderly tenants out of affordable rental accommodation have waged a tireless campaign to oppose the developer’s plans. Their campaign has had an impact. On 8 December 2023, the City of Sydney local government ended up unanimously knocking back LFDD’s Development Application (DA). However, the developer is appealing the ruling. Moreover, LFDD has announced that they will be closing the boarding houses regardless of the fate of their DA. They have stated that they will be going ahead with evicting the tenants on February 1, even before the matter is scheduled to be heard in the NSW Land and Environment Court three months later although, reportedly, the City of Sydney has now obtained a legally enforceable agreement from the developer that they will keep the houses open until such time as all residents have been found safe and suitable alternative housing.

In response to the Sydney developer’s despicable agenda, those campaigning for the rights of the tenants repeatedly called for the local and/or state government to buy the buildings from the developer and run the property as government-owned rental accommodation. For months their calls were ignored. Yet as their campaign alerted more and more people to what was happening and community outrage at the developer’s plans intensified, the state and local governments were eventually compelled to act. This month, the City of Sydney mayor announced that the local government and the NSW state government would be prepared to buy out the developer if the developer sells the building for a “fair price”. This offers hope for the tenants. However, the joint state government and City of Sydney plan is contingent on a community housing provider that would run the site also buying into the project. To date, no willing community housing provider has been found. Most significantly, the Sydney developer still has to agree to sell and at a price acceptable to the two arms of government. Moreover, how high a price that the governments will end up being prepared to accept will indicate to what degree these pro-big-end-of-town politicians have been pushed into truly protecting the tenancy of the boarding house residents … as distinct from broadcasting announcements merely aimed at making themselves “seen to be” concerned about the tenants’ plight.

To date, LFDD has refused to sell the boarding houses to the governments. The campaign resisting the evictions has responded, completely correctly, by calling for the state to make a compulsory acquisition of the buildings if the developer remains unprepared to sell. Now is a critical time for the campaign resisting the evictions of the Selwyn Street boarding houses residents to be bolstered. We urge all our readers to support this community campaign that is being waged by the tenants and their local and wider supporters. For more information, go to the campaign website: https://www.change.org/p/save-our-boarding-houses-protect-our-neighbours-from-homelessness . As well as defending the Selwyn Street boarding houses residents, campaign organisers have also called to “Ban boarding house closures”, “Ban boarding house evictions”, “Freeze rent increases” on boarding houses so that residents cannot be removed due to loss of affordability and to “Immediately enforce tighter controls on adherence to safety, security and amenity standards so that residents cannot be removed due to loss of habitability.” These demands must be supported.

The evictions of the residents from the Selwyn Street boarding houses must be stopped by any means necessary! We also say that the buildings should be run as public housing and not privately-run “community housing” – for the “community housing” option makes the plan to stop the evictions contingent on a buy in from a community housing provider that may not happen. Moreover, privately-run “community housing” providers often treat tenants more harshly than public housing tenants are treated.

Turn the Vacant Homes of the Rich
into Low-Rent Accommodation –
Not the Other Way Around!

What Australian-owned LFDD is trying to do in Paddington is what many other developers are doing in the rest of Sydney and Australia as a whole. In Inner West Sydney’s Dulwich Hill for example, 75 residents of a boarding house were evicted early this year so that the dwelling could be converted into a more luxurious site charging much higher rents. And such instances are hardly just confined to boarding houses. Throughout the private rental market, developers and investors know that they can extract more money building or renovating homes that can then be sold for high prices, or rented for high rents, than they can make by maintaining homes with rents affordable by most working class and lower income people. This is simply how the capitalist “free market” “works”! That is why public housing is so needed to increase the supply of decent, low-rent accommodation. But over the last several decades, state and federal governments of all stripes – Liberal/National, Labor and Labor-Greens coalitions – have instead been selling off public housing left, right and centre. No wonder private landlords are able to put up rents … they know that renters have nowhere else to go! Meanwhile, bipartisan government policies favouring wealthy landlords and property speculators – like negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions – have driven up house prices and, therefore, rents. These are all the reasons why rents are unaffordable for most working class people in Sydney and much of the rest of this country. It has absolutely zero do with immigration or foreign property buyers. This is important to understand because the capitalist ruling class and its media are disgustingly scapegoating immigration and migrants for the rental affordability crisis.

What we need to fight for is for a complete reversal of what Australia’s governments have been doing over the last several decades. We need to stop all sell-offs of public housing. Instead, we need a massive increase in public housing. Part of the funds for this can be acquired by forcing governments to stop handing over huge amounts of money to speculators and other property investors through its negative gearing and capital gains tax concession policies. Also, all privately-owned boarding houses should be brought into public ownership. Moreover, instead of allowing developers and other landlords to drive out low-income tenants in order to supply expensive housing for the wealthy, we should fight to turn the excess, unused housing of the ultra-rich (which includes multiple holiday homes as well as homes held for property speculation) into low-rent public housing for the masses. As an urgent measure needed to address the rental affordability crisis, we demand that any dwelling owned by a household with more than five million dollars worth of property assets, and that is unoccupied for more than two months within a year, should be confiscated and turned into public housing.

But how we are going to win these demands? Determined and energetic local community campaigns can to some degree push back against especially egregious developments that threaten to drive out low-income tenants. However, to maximise the chances of success of such campaigns and to reverse the nationwide erosion of low-rent accommodation requires mobilising significant sections of the working class in mass actions. This is essential because the current, pro-speculators, pro-landlord housing policies are driven by the interests of the wealthy capitalist ruling class. Such a formidable ruling elite can only be pushed back by unleashing the potential power of the working class masses, united with other low-income tenants and all genuine opponents of poverty. To turn back the ruling class’ destruction of low-rent housing, this working class-centred force will need to unleash industrial action, protest pickets to stop evictions and resist the sell-off of public housing dwellings and mass occupations to reclaim the vacant homes of the ultra-rich for public use. To win the most politically advanced sections of the workers movement to participating in such struggle requires connecting the fight to massively increase the amount of public housing and to bring the vacant homes of the ultra-rich into the public housing supply, with the broader fight for workers rights – that is with the struggle to reverse the erosion of real wages, defend militant unions like the CFMEU and convert casual jobs into secure ones with all the rights of permanency. To unleash this necessary combined struggle in turn requires a fight to reverse the current losing Laborite strategy leading the workers movement with one that rejects seeking “common ground” with the capitalist exploiting class and, instead, is based on militant class-struggle resistance against the capitalists. Let’s all work together to show that united workers power can stick it to these filthy capitalist developers, save 32 low-income, mainly elderly Sydney residents from being thrown out onto the streets and lead the struggle toward a kinder, compassionate and prosperous future for all.