‘Nowhere else for these people to go’: What happens to The Block’s evicted Gatwick Hotel residents?

THE Block’s cameras have gone, the apartments have sold and the contestants won hundreds of thousands. But not everyone’s happy.

WHAT happens now to the former residents of The Gatwick?

The camera crews have gone home and the former owners of the notorious boarding house — who sold the building to Channel 9’s The Block last year for $10 million — snapped up one of the renovated apartments for $2.77 million in Sunday night’s finale.

Sisters Yvette Kelly and Rose Banks ran The Gatwick for more than 30 years before finally caving to public pressure to sell the “drug infested hell hole”, the site of scores of serious crimes including rapes, drug dealing and assault.

Not everyone was happy. News the building had been bought by the reality home renovation show sparked protests earlier this year. Some questioned what would happen to the people being moved on.

Sad about the Gatwick. Thinking of people I knew who lived in there before. Thinking of people I knew who died in there before. Sad.

— Meshel Laurie (@Meshel_Laurie) October 28, 2018

A new documentary premiering tonight, Judging The Gatwick, follows residents as they are moved out of their “place of last resort” to make way for “the glamour of gentrification and renovation”.

The film was created by director Genevieve Bailey, Looking Glass Pictures and advertising agency Thinkerbell, with profits going towards Father Bob Maguire’s foundation, which worked with many Gatwick residents.

It features interviews with the residents to find out “who they were, how they ended up there, and importantly where are they now”, according to Mitzi Goldman from Looking Glass Pictures.

Protesters angry at The Block’s purchase of The Gatwick. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin

Host Scott Cam with the five teams on the first day of filming.

“I hated it when I first came here, I only heard the worst things about it,” one resident says in the film. “The first month I basically stayed in my room. I left Sydney in 2005 as a boy and The Gatwick has been the last part of my transformation, and it’s the part which made me human.”

Thinkerbell founder Adam Ferrier described it as a “complicated” story and to say the Gatwick had a reputation as a dangerous place was an “understatement”.

“It used to be the last privately run hostel for people who couldn’t get a place anywhere else, if they were too violent or dysfunctional,” he said. “They were absolutely the most ostracised people in society.”

Yvette and Rose, who “worked their guts out” running the boarding house for so many years, “confused the f***” out of everyone by buying back into the building, he said.

The Port Phillip Leader reported outrage among local residents on Monday, who described it as the “ultimate f*** you” to the St Kilda community forced to endure living near the flophouse for years.

“They cut the ribbon for the launch of The Block, and they say, ‘Everyone used to hate us, now they love us’,” Mr Ferrier said. “It’s really weird, they haven’t considered the optics of that. It’s a really complicated story.”

Mr Ferrier said it wasn’t clear where the residents had ended up — a question that would be answered in a follow-up film.

“They all got dispersed,” he said. “Where do they go? It’s the last of its kind. There’s nowhere else for these people to go, because the only way you get to The Gatwick is if there’s nowhere else.”

Mr Ferrier said he was drawn to the topic through his agency’s work with the Father Bob Maguire Foundation but also as a St Kilda resident himself, ambivalent about gentrification.

“Every St Kilda resident will tell you they love the character of St Kilda, but they also love house prices going up,” he said.

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Originally published as ‘Nowhere else for these people to go’: What happens to The Block’s evicted Gatwick Hotel residents?