Boarding houses closing across Sydney after crackdown on fire safety
Maria Elena Ang lived in a boarding house in Sydney's inner-west for 22 years but says she was one of a dozen people evicted with a week's notice.
The Inner West Council issued the former owner of the boarding house a non-compliance order for fire safety standards and, instead of addressing it, they sold the property.
'"I had to trawl the streets finding affordable accommodation," Ms Ang said.
Ms Ang's eviction followed a council crackdown on safety compliance after a deadly boarding house fire in Newtown last year.
Police charged a man with three counts of murder after he allegedly set fire to the boarding house.
Three people died inside Vajda House in Newtown, which was allegedly doused with an accelerant and ignited.
However, despite the council's intention of avoiding another tragedy, it had a negative impact on those relying on boarding houses for accommodation.
Ms Ang's story is part of a growing trend, according to affordable housing advocates.
"A lot of these are being sold to give way to very fancy accommodations that are more expensive than usual, beyond the affordability of most people," Ms Ang said.
However, she is one of the lucky ones who found somewhere else to live, with homelessness across the state on the rise.
Boarding houses are a low-cost accommodation option with shared bathrooms, kitchens and living areas.
They are often in a terrible condition which most Australians would not deem acceptable to live in.
But many have no other option, particularly with rental prices across the city at all-time highs.
"We know that there's not enough social housing and often people's choices, if it's not social housing, it's boarding houses," Newtown Neighbourhood Centre (NCC) CEO Elaine Macnish said.
The NNC, the state's only boarding house outreach service, said 26 homes in the Sydney area have closed since March last year when the deadly boarding house fire happened in Newtown.
"Some boarding houses are as large as 80 or 50 beds, so it's a huge number being taken out of that affordable accommodation market," Ms Macnish said.
A boarding house on Pitt Steet in Sydney's CBD where almost 30 men lived closed down last week due to unspecified health reasons.
It is set to be redeveloped into a multi-storey hotel.
The neighbourhood centre helped rehouse those men but said they are trying to stay ahead of a "crisis", and warned there are more boarding houses in the city set to close in the coming weeks.
Ms Macnish said many of those 26 boarding houses which had closed recently would be renovated.
She said while improving the conditions was welcome, it meant the owners could charge higher prices, leaving fewer affordable accommodation options on the market.
"At the moment an average cost would be around $220 a week for a room in a boarding house," she said.
"Often once these boarding houses have been renovated the charges might go up to $400 to 450 a week which, for many of the clients we work with, they just can't afford that."
The Inner West Council area hosts almost a third of the boarding houses across NSW.
The council ramped up compliance checks after the Newtown fire, conducting more than 200 since.
"About half of the more than 500 boarding houses in the inner-west are not even registered with the government and we need a better system of oversight," Mayor Darcy Byrne said.
"We can't wait for another person to be killed in a fire."
He blamed "gross underinvestment" in social housing across the state for the current situation.
"Vulnerable people shouldn't be left with the choice of living in sub-standard conditions in a boarding house or having no home to go to at all," he said.
The Inner West Council last year proposed the former NSW Coalition government conduct a review into boarding house regulation to reduce the burden on councils.
Mr Byrne said he was ignored and fears more people will lose their lives if there is not better oversight of the sector.
Jenny Leong is the Green's Member for Newtown, an area with one of the highest densities of boarding houses in NSW.
"The idea that the private market is going to somehow step in and support vulnerable people in our city is put to the side … that is an outrageous concept," Ms Leong said.
Ms Leong said the state's current planning laws allow boarding houses to be shut and converted if they are no longer deemed financially viable.
She wants the NSW government to ensure boarding houses with affordable rooms remain on the market for perpetuity.
"The NSW government has a role to play here and they could be stepping up now by offering the opportunity to purchase existing boarding houses so we're not losing that stock," she said.
"The idea that we are adding to the homelessness problem instead of stepping in to try and hold these buildings in public hands is a completely outrageous situation."
The NSW Minister for Housing and Homelessness Rose Jackson said in a statement that NSW was in a "housing crisis".
Ms Jackson said the NSW government "have made expanding social and affordable housing a top priority".
She said it was developing plans on how to spend $610 million from the federal government's Social Housing Accelerator Fund, which will help deliver its goal of creating 75,000 new homes every year for five years.
The government is also investing in a program to deliver 12 new generation boarding house projects for those most in need across Sydney, the statement said.
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