Wayne Yu’s shop sits on Whitehorse Road, in the middle of what used to be a main shopping strip opposite Box Hill Station in Melbourne’s east.
Now, both of his neighbours have shut up shop.
“It feels so lonely … I am the only one to open,” Mr Yu says.
“It’s not good for me, no-one comes to the street.”
All 14 shops are scheduled for demolition, and only four, including Mr Yu’s supplement store, remain open.
While the Victorian government’s contentious and expensive Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) continues to spark fierce political debate, the project seeking to connect the city’s major rail lines is becoming a reality on the ground.
Locals around the six planned underground stations have seen homes and entire blocks of shops compulsorily acquired and demolition has begun.
Heavy machinery crawls over the grounds, preparing them for the big dig required for six brand new underground stations.
The Suburban Rail Loop Authority (SRLA) reports it has now purchased 299 of the estimated 314 properties it will need to make way for SRL East, the first stage of the project linking Cheltenham in the south-east to Box Hill.
On Mr Yu’s shopping strip, the Chinese hotpot restaurant to his right is permanently hidden behind grey blinds.
On his left, the once bopping K-Pop-inspired dance studio is silent — a few abandoned tables are all that’s left inside.
The pet salon is now completely hidden by plywood boards secured over its windows and doors.
The front of the real estate agency has been graffitied and letters are piling up on the floor of another restaurant that’s been stripped of everything but its welcome desk.
It’s been 10 months since Mr Yu was told he would have to leave by December, but he’s still waiting to find an alternative location.
“We don’t want to move, we have regular customers, and if we move, maybe we will lose them,” he says.
Mr Yu has been provided with professional support to help him find a new premises, and was given three months of free rent following the purchase of the property his store occupies.
“I think that’s the best they can do,” he says.
Inevitability in the air
Behind the shopping strip, in a nine-storey apartment block, residents are also preparing to leave as the deadline for the building’s demolition looms.
Adit Nugroho has rented in the Elland Avenue apartments for three years and says since residents were first notified of the compulsory acquisition in 2021, he, his wife and two children had passed through all the stages of grieving and landed on acceptance.
“I stopped putting much thought on it,” he says.
“The first time they told us we sort of went into panic mode, thinking we had to leave and find a new apartment to rent and what not, then they keep pushing [the time] back.”
The current deadline for moving out is September 2025, but Mr Nugroho believes it will be pushed back again.
“For me as a tenant it’s fine, I just need to find extra money to move, but for the owners, they were really upset,” he says.
Mr Nugroho says he thought the project sounded great when he first heard about it, but since the pandemic, he believed more people were working from home, so there was less need for it.
Like Mr Yu, Mr Nugroho was given three months of free rent after SRLA acquired his building.
He says the SRLA has been trying to help tenants.
“They give us a newsletter saying which properties are available every week, but we haven’t started looking yet,” he says.
ABC News
