Speculation on Broadway

The tenants had occupied the small terraces on Kensington Street, Chippendale, for a number of years. Among them was Rebecca Baird, who had a thriving art-making and teaching practice based at nearby Pine Street Community Arts Centre. Rent was $100 a week for the small and under-maintained cottages - a rare break for low-income inner-city tenants (“There’s naught around” as Thane Brown and Robbie Jordan, two other evictees, noted to the SSH at the time).

Over this period the shortage of affordable housing in Sydney has only worsened, as any low-income renter could tell you.

Such people include artists who face a well-documented shortage of studio and gallery space. In appreciation of this - and to broad acclaim in local and statewide news media - in 2008, Frasers offered some of the empty space in Kensington Street to artists for three-month free residencies while the area awaits development.

This move was obviously welcomed, however it is incongruous. Spaces for living in - for housing people on low incomes and supporting in at least one case a community arts practice - are closed down and the residents displaced.

Simultaneously, opportunity for cost-free studio space opens up.

The deployment of Fraser Studios may be seen as laudable corporate community engagement on the one hand, and on the other, an act of image-conscious tokenism. It may also be read as part of a broader global pattern of gentrification and its impact on folks in precarious employment, with low incomes and/or a reliance on public housing.

Part of this impact falls upon a community of creative classes of students, artists, writers et al who deliver cultural capital or “creative chic” for the area at the same time as they can’t afford the rent. Those members of this class who are considered to boost the cultural image of the corporate developers may benefit briefly - others may be evicted from their homes.

As for the future of Kensington Street, the Chief Operating Officer of Frasers Property Australia, Nicholas Wolff, advised that “[architects] Tonkin Zulaikha Greer have developed a scheme for Kensington Street intended to create an active city laneway focused on dining, entertainment, creative businesses and boutique retail”. He added that “as much of Kensington Street is of heritage significance, many existing buildings are to be retained and restored, carefully integrated with new structures and buildings, with pedestrian connections to the centre of the Frasers Broadway site”.

Photo: Ali Blogg - Caption: Clare, Rebecca Baird and Digger the dog (SSH June 2007)

Source: South Sydney Herald June 2009 www.southsydneyherald.com.au