The Randwick campus redevelopment. Credit:NSW GOVERNMENT Sam Sarkis, 63, arrived home on a June evening last year, two days after the state budget was handed down, just as representatives from Health Infrastructure were walking up his driveway on Eurimbla Street. "They said we will be acquiring all these properties, here's a letter and a booklet to tell you about it. We'd like to have a meeting in a couple of weeks to discuss it," Mr Sarkis said. "As soon as I heard 'acquisition' I went into blur mode. I was gone. I don't know what I said after that. "It was like, hang on a minute - you're going to take my home."

Eileen Collins, 88, has lived in her home on Eurimbla Avenue in Randwick for 46 years. Credit:Louise Kennerley Mr Sarkis, and the other door-knocked residents, received the news hours before the general public. The next morning, Treasurer Dominic Perrottet and Health Minister Brad Hazzard held a press conference at the hospital, where they publicly unveiled the redevelopment plans. Eileen Collins said she would miss the close community in her street. Credit:Louise Kennerley In total, 89 properties will be bulldozed to make way for the hospital facility. Twenty-six of them are owned by the University of NSW, which in recent years has been snapping up properties as they came onto the market. The new building will link the university's medical school with the hospital.

A Health Infrastructure spokeswoman said the hospital was close to capacity, and expanding the campus to the west was "the best way to deliver high-quality co-located clinical services". A handful of residents have already accepted the government's settlement offers and left the neighbourhood. The remaining residents have until May to negotiate a settlement price before their homes are forcibly acquired. In 2016, the NSW government reformed its property acquisition process, and promised a "fairer, more balanced and more transparent acquisition process from start to finish". The reforms followed negative coverage of the government's indelicate handling of the acquisition of homes for the WestConnex motorway project, which later drew a mea culpa from then-premier Mike Baird. However, even with these reforms in place, the system relies on a clinical, bureaucratic process to navigate a highly emotional situation, where construction deadlines determine the date homeowners must be gone.

On Eurimbla Avenue, at least 35 of the 53 homes to be acquired are privately owned, and many residents count their connection to their street in decades, not years. Eileen Collins, 88, has lived in the street for 46 years, where she has nursed four family members through illness, then death. She's also been through this before. She and her husband bought their home in 1972, using the compensation they were given after their home in Palmer Street, Woolloomooloo, was compulsorily acquired for the Cahill Expressway. "I can understand they want a hospital, and they've got to take homes to get it. I can understand that. But I think it should have been done a little bit differently," she said. "Not just, 'here's a letter, you're going'." "Everybody knows me around here. If I'm sick, they help me. Or they ring up and say 'do you want anything'. It's a lovely little close community around here. That will be gone soon." Mr Sarkis has spent most of his life in Eurimbla Avenue. He grew up in his parent's duplex at No.44, leaving the street in his late teens. Years later, in his 40s, he returned to live in No.42, the property his parents had rented for decades to pay off their mortgage.

"I have a very strong history to this street, this house," he said. "It's bad enough to lose your family home. It's made worse that they're going to bulldoze it down. It feels wrong. "No amount of money can compensate you when you don't want to sell." Dimitrios Hatzitoulousis and his brother Tass spent $300,000 renovating their Eurimbla Avenue home, which once belonged to their grandparents. As builders, they oversaw the work themselves. "We fixed it up to high finishes, knowing it was going to stay in the family forever. Otherwise we could have saved quite a few quid using cheaper finishes," he said. For many, knowing their land will be used for something unequivocally good, has made the upheaval no easier.

"It's not a road or a bridge. It's a hospital," Mr Hatzitoulousis said. "We all accepted it for the greater good of the community. Unfortunately, it's at our detriment. "Just thinking about it causes a lot of stress, and sleepless nights. Even waiting for the evaluation causes anxiety."