COVER STORY

Rising city real estate prices are a great incentive for house hunters, investors and business people to venture beyond the ‘flannelette curtain’, but gentrification comes at a price in Hobart’s northern suburbs

Priced-out homebuyers venture beyond the ‘flannelette curtain’ into Hobart’s northern suburbs

A t first it was hard to tell if it really was moving. It was almost as if somebody was hiding behind it and couldn’t stop twitching. Then about two years ago it began to billow outwards, first in soothing undulations and then more insistently, tugging at its hooks in the winds of economic change. Until finally the metaphorical flannelette curtain of yore, the much-referenced invisible line that runs along Creek and Risdon roads, dividing the inner suburbs of Hobart and the Glenorchy municipality, either fell or leapt north or blew away altogether (depending on who you ask). And the stampede for cheap real estate on the far side was on.

Looking back to Hobart through the “latte line”, as some call the old boundary when viewed from a northerly perspective, some Moonans seem bemused by the sudden “discovery” of their suburb by citysiders. If they are among the majority of residents who are already homeowners, there is generally reason to feel positive about the burst of interest and activity in their suburb. Their homes are worth significantly more than they were two years ago.

The empty shopfronts of the past half-decade along the Main Rd strip are mostly filled with small businesses including Shake a Leg Jr cafe, which is quite the destination for “good” coffee. There is a huge new Chemist Warehouse near the Harris Scarfe department store. Cute clothing and homewares shop Billy C Diggs, down Memory Lane, looks like a Salamanca boutique, only it’s more affordable; and there’s an African grocery store and a vegetarian Chinese restaurant. The Moonah Arts Centre, an attractive multipurpose space in Albert Rd, opened in 2015 and plays a key role in telling local stories, including of its migrant communities from Africa and Nepal. An annual food and cultural event, The Moonah Taste of the World Festival, goes from strength to strength, despite a disappointingly wet start to this year’s event. And then there is Lucy Baker’s restaurant, the sleekly contemporary St. Albi, which many people say put “new” Moonah on the map.

Glenorchy Mayor Kristie Johnston says the notion of a flannelette curtain was “a very real thing” when she was a child. The term, inspired by that symbol of working-class masculinity, the tartan-checked brushed-cotton shirt, may not have come into popular parlance until the 1990s, but Johnston says the sense of “Us and Them” was certainly about. “We didn’t socialise with anyone on the other side,” she says.

The 37-year-old, who was returned to her role as mayor in January after a tumultuous period in which the council was sacked and fresh elections held, describes herself as a “proud Glenorchy girl”. “I have lived in Glenorchy my whole life. I went to school in Glenorchy, I married a Glenorchy boy and I have Glenorchy children,” says the qualified lawyer and criminologist. “I am really pleased to be raising my children here. It has a gritty integrity about it. The people of Glenorchy are really genuine, salt-of-the-earth people.”

When the council recently asked the community to describe itself as part of its 2040 Vision research, the word “bogan” kept appearing on the word map. “We are not shy about saying, ‘This is who we are and if you don’t like it, that’s tough’,” says Johnston. “What you see is what you get.”

Johnston has a theory about the area’s rising popularity that goes beyond housing affordability and the Mona effect, with the world-acclaimed museum at Berriedale giving the area hitherto unknown cachet. “I think Hobart perhaps has cottoned on to the fact that we have a really great sense of community here and it’s probably worthwhile participating in that,” she says. “So I think rather than us pushing the flannelette curtain that way, they’ve pushed it this way. We haven’t changed our character. People have just discovered it’s not so bad on the other side. I don’t think the curtain’s moved. I think it’s dropped.”

It would be a mistake to think everyone’s winning in new Moonah, though. Gentrification, in crude terms, is the process of the middle class “invading” a working-class area and changing it to suit itself after being priced out of suburbs closer to the city centre. It has predictable phases and consequences, as can be seen way back through Hobart’s history. Even elite Battery Point was once a working-class ‘hood. There are always beneficiaries, but greater affluence in a community can come at a heavy cost to some. Hardest hit are usually renters, with one leading economist telling TasWeekend gentrification will inevitably lead to displacement of some long-term Moonah residents if there is not an urgent overhaul of affordable housing policies.

The warning comes on the heels of last month’s biannual Rental Affordability Index, in which Hobart pipped Sydney as Australia’s least affordable capital city for renters.

Actor Luke McGregor has just been nominated for a Best Actor Logie for his role as Daniel McCallum, a young man working in his family’s real estate business, in the Tasmanian-made comedy series Rosehaven. In real life, Luke’s younger brother John, 31, works alongside their father Chris and mum Julie at McGregor First National Real Estate in Moonah. As we chat in a newly refurbished meeting room at the Main Rd agency, the younger McGregor laughingly insists the similarities end there between the TV characters and his real family.

While he may not be in the running for a coveted celebrity accolade, John McGregor, too, is on the up and up. It’s a sweet time to be in real estate in the northern suburbs of Hobart and he is understandably delighted by the growing interest in the patch where he, Luke and their middle brother Scott were raised and schooled, and where he has spent most of his life. Father Chris has been selling real estate in the area since the mid-1980s, with Julie joining the business in the 1990s.

“[Until relatively recently] people thought that you were going to drive across that threshold into Glenorchy municipality and get punched in the face,” McGregor says.

“Someone who had grown up in Kingston, for example, might say to a friend, ‘Oh, but you wouldn’t buy in Glenorchy, don’t buy in Claremont, they are just horrible suburbs.’ Even now when we are talking to people from interstate, they will drop these things: ‘I’ve heard this area is rough.’ And you have to say, ‘You’ve had advice from people who frankly have no idea what they are talking about.’ Every suburb has its patch of rougher element and most of the perceptions that existed 30 years ago [here] may have made sense, but they don’t anymore.”

What does make sense to McGregor is that suburbs such as Moonah and Lutana, across the Brooker Highway, are capturing homebuyers who would not have deigned to even attend a house inspection a few years ago.

“Where people thought they had to live in, say, New Town, because it was an aspirational suburb, now they are going across to Moonah and realising it isn’t so different. It’s just that as opposed to red brick, you’ve got more weatherboard,” he says.

As inner Hobart prices surge, there is a knock-on effect. Moonah house prices are up by almost 40 per cent in the past two years, to a median price of $436,000, according to Real Estate Institute of Tasmania figures, and properties spend an average of just 10 days on the market before being snapped up.

“That’s a $200,000 difference from New Town, which is closer to a $620,000 median, with less than five minutes’ worth of driving,” says McGregor. “Hobart is, for its first time, experiencing problems of affordability and that’s a huge shift in affordability between suburbs. Even people on their second or third move, with quite a bit of equity, can find themselves priced out of the suburb they once lived in.

“One guy I know sold his house in North Hobart a year ago and thought he got a good deal, but because he cashed in too early, the market shot up and he couldn’t get back into the suburb. So then he was, ‘Well, I guess I’ll look at Moonah.’

“All of a sudden people pulled the veil, the flannelette curtain, across and went, ‘Hang on a minute, this ain’t so bad, I have no idea what I was thinking because I completely had my references wrong.’”

It is clear McGregor knows the suburb like the back of his hand as he whizzes TasWeekend around the hills of West Moonah and the flatlands of the central district in his white SUV. With clear affection for the place, he points out eras of houses, from modest early 20th-century weatherboards ripe for renovation to mid-century hillside brick veneers with granny flats and plastercolumn balusters, built by European immigrants.

He slows as we pass recently traded homes, quoting estimates and going prices off the top of his head. “This one was ‘offers over $390,000’ and we fielded 32 offers,” he says of a three-bedroom circa 1923 weatherboard home on a quiet street off Central Ave. “It eventually went for $533,000 … One thing I found interesting looking at our stats is that most of the [prospective] buyers [for this place] were from West Hobart, North Hobart, South Hobart and New Town.”

The interest and market briskness marks a big change. “There was very little activity in 2012-13 when you look at days on market and volumes of sales compared with today. That was the slowest it’s been since the early 1990s,” says McGregor.

With the state’s economic upturn and new growth cycle of the past two years, McGregor says he is seeing a shift in commercial operations, too. “People are saying, ‘Well, I would love to have started that business in town, but I can’t afford to, so where can I realistically afford to do it, what’s the nearest place?’ And, again, that’s Moonah.”

So where does he think the flannelette curtain is now? “I’d say it’s at Glenorchy, wherever the cut-off of Moonah to Glenorchy is,” he says. “It’s just shifted suburbs. I think of it as a giant cloud above. And without question it will continue to move.”

Kaitlin Sulman, 25, is one half of a “somewhat Insta-famous” couple of home renovators, along with her partner Brodie Daley, 26. “I think I would say, right now, that the flannelette curtain would be just going into [the suburb] of Glenorchy,” Sulman tells

TasWeekend over coffee at Shake a Leg Jr, a smart-looking cafe with exposed brick walls and polished floorboards that opened two years ago next to McGregor First National (which owns the building). “But if I was thinking with my real- estate hat on, I would probably say it goes as far as Austins Ferry. You’ve got Berriedale and Claremont and I think that whole area is going to become very popular soon.”

Sulman, an emergency services worker, and Daley, a builder, bought their first property together, a 1948 weatherboard cottage in Moonah, in June 2016, spending $256,750. They attracted lots of local interest by sharing their DIY renovation on Instagram (@innovate.build), starting with the gutting of the interior. When they put the three-bedroom, one-bathroom home on the market for $390,000-$430,000 last July, they received comments on Instagram and Facebook saying, “You’ve got to be kidding me”. But eight days later they accepted a cash offer of $431,500 from a local buyer.

The couple has since bought a vacant block in Fourth Ave and is waiting for council approval to build three, three-bedroom, two-bathroom units. “When we saw this block we saw it as a chance to invest in our own business,” says Sulman.

We head down Main Rd on foot and duck into Un-Racked, a strength and conditioning gym owned by her mate Joey Edwards. He opened here two years ago after working at a city gym and Sulman thinks it’s a great example of a thriving out-ofthe-way local business. “People come from everywhere to train here,” says Edwards, who is wrapping up a personal training session with a local IT worker when we arrive. “It’s 10 minutes from the city and there’s always parking.”

He reckons Derwent Park Rd is the new “cappuccino line”.

Restaurateur Lucy Baker, 32, was taken aback by the general reaction to the news she was opening her first restaurant, St. Albi, at Moonah, 2½ years ago. Growing up in Melbourne with her mother and spending holidays in Tassie, the daughter of Hobart restaurateur and former AFL player Garry Baker was largely oblivious to the preconceptions many Hobartians held about the northern suburbs.

“Living in Melbourne you have all those industrial northern suburbs in backstreets, so you are down smelly alleyways and backstreets with great bars, or coming across a house that is an awesome cafe.

“So to be here in Hobart’s northern suburbs, I didn’t have that fear … When Dad and I told people what we were planning, they’d be saying, ‘Why would we go out there?’ I didn’t really grasp the concept of a flannelette curtain.”

She says her father, who co-owns Rockwall Bar + Grill at Salamanca, faced a similar reaction years ago when he bought a big site down at Blackmans Bay and established the Beach Restaurant complex. “When he did that, everyone said he was crazy, but we think like Melbourne people where the food and drink culture is so big, and he just had this vision.”

Gambling on a “build it and they will come” theory, the Bakers opened St. Albi in a former nuts and spices warehouse on Albert Rd in December 2015. Word of mouth worked a treat, particularly because of the unexpected location. “We had lots of bookings, right from the start,” she says. “Because it’s Hobart I’ve learnt everything spreads like wildfire. Just tell a hairdresser and say it a bit loud on the bus, and everyone knows.”

Business over the first two years of operation has exceeded all their projections. The space is huge, seating about 150 people, and stylish, with lots of black and raw concrete and warm timber features, quirky pendant lighting and Scandi-cool chairs.

Main courses start at $28, up to $60. Salamanca prices, in other words. Baker says plenty of customers return for their signature steak rub, the Cox, a coffee and spice concoction mixed by head chef George Cox. “Our customers are coming for a reason,” says Baker. “It’s not like Salamanca with its foot traffic.”

These days, Baker hears a lot about the role St. Albi has played in activating the area, how its arrival was “a gamechanger”. “A lot of people are buying in this area now,” she says. “You don’t want to say St. Albi put it on the map, but I think by us coming here and being quite a big presence in the northern suburbs, it’s given confidence to the area.” Kristie Johnston has “legacy issues” on her mind when we meet on a chilly Monday afternoon at a small cafe off Moonah’s

main supermarket. It’s third time lucky here today, after the first two venues she suggested were closed. It’s also the day before the tabling in State Parliament of an Integrity Report detailing conflicts of interest and attempts to obtain financial advantage by some former senior officers at the council.

“There is an expectation in the community that we’ve got a new council so everything is fine, the slate is wiped clean,” says Johnston. “The new council functions well, but the problems left behind – major project failures and bad budgeting decisions with a series of operational deficits – have crippled us financially.”

Johnston, who was returned to her role in a landslide vote in the January election, may face a backlash if she pushes ahead with a hefty rates rise. “I’m very much aware I might be going from the position of most popular mayor to least popular mayor in Tasmania in about six weeks’ time,” she says.

Her face brightens when we move on to discuss one of the projects she is most passionate about, a light rail linking the city and northern suburbs. Indeed it was her efforts to enthuse the community about the proposed project that eventually led her into public life, when she went out to community groups as a young mum to share the vision of her engineering husband Ben, who is the president of the Northern Suburbs Rail Action Group.

Johnston believes a light rail service between Hobart and Brighton along the existing, disused rail corridor would offer far more than public transport over coming decades. She sees it as the best and most achievable activator for urban renewal in the area. Glenorchy Council’s position for almost a decade has been in-principle support for the light rail project. She is frustrated by what she describes as other levels of governments’ limited vision of the proposal.

“State and federal governments [are] mostly looking at it in terms of transport economics, a crude estimate of bums on seats to get revenue,” says Johnston. “They haven’t been looking at [its potential] more broadly in terms of wider community aspects. The greatest benefit would come from the city-shaping that would happen around it.”

An Infrastructure Tasmania report into the proposed project released by the State Government two years ago concluded that while having a rail corridor in place was a huge advantage, the project was not feasible. An agreement with the Federal Government to accelerate a City Deal for Hobart has since raised hopes the $100-million project may yet see the light of day.

“The activation of the land around the rail corridor and the opportunities for economic development are huge,” says Johnston. “At Glenorchy Council, we are focusing on the opportunities [around light rail] to change historic land uses from light industrial, for instance, to inner-residential. There is significant opportunity for two to four-storey housing, with car parking underneath, in small apartment blocks.”

She says lack of appropriate housing stock is a growing issue and points to the newish apartment-style public housing near the Hopkins St, Moonah, carpark, as a good example of the density level she would like to see more of along the rail corridor.

“We have areas like Rosetta and Montrose, with older populations in big three or four-bedroom homes wanting to downsize to easy-access apartments and there’s not that availability in Glenorchy,” she says. “There’s a huge demand, but the market has not responded yet. And equally there are a lot of younger families who would like to purchase those bigger homes.”

Light rail would attract development, stimulate growth and provide a new mix of housing. “Developers need an incentive to invest [here],” she says. “They will sit on property and not do any work on it unless there is a gain to achieve by it.”

It is hard to escape a note of resignation in the voice of Australia Institute chief economist and public policy commentator Richard Denniss when he is asked about the implications of gentrification. A frequent visitor to Hobart over many years, including last week to launch his new Quarterly Essay on neoliberalism, he says renters beware. “The suburbs don’t get bigger. New people move in and older residents are priced out and in turn they face the longer commute and/or less desirable choices that those moving into these suburbs are keen to avoid.”

The latest Real Estate Institute of Tasmania figures show half of all house sales in Moonah in March were sold to investors, half of whom were from the mainland. Rents around Hobart are soaring and Australia Bureau of Statistics figures from 2016 show that 37 per cent of Moonah’s residents are renters.

“Australia needs a housing policy,” says Denniss. “Every level of government could do something, which is why no level of government here does anything. We need to implement policies quite quickly to keep lower-income houses in the mix. Hobart is not the first city to experience [housing affordability issues] yet for decades policy makers have pretended that either this isn’t a problem or it’s not their problem. The idea that the market will sort this out has delivered enormous wealth to some and is imposing enormous pain on many.”

He says more public housing is needed and gentrifying suburbs should set aside key-worker housing for teachers, nurses and other essential providers to live near their workplaces. As well, he believes Australia should emulate Europe by placing obligations on property developers to subsidise a percentage of their accommodation to provide affordable rental housing.

“It’s up to Tasmanians whether they want their cities to bring people together or keep them apart,” Denniss says. “If they want to be like Sydney and have parts of the city that are financially and even physically inaccessible to most, they can. If they want an egalitarian city where people of all incomes and backgrounds can grow up near each other, they can do that, too.

“So as the flannelette curtain drifts across [Greater] Hobart, the big question is what if anything state and local governments are planning to do to maintain Hobart’s status as an affordable and accessible place to live.”