Community has found a way to grow in the close quarters of Blackburn Street - a little side lane in the city's South East.

August Towers, an apartment complex development on the corner of Hutt Street and South Terrace, stretches high above the Blackburn Street skyline.

It is a lonely monolith and the only sign of architectural progress visible from the street, where, on each side of the road, there is barely a break in the flow of workers cottages, save for the odd cluster of red bricks.

A street-facing basketball ring juts out from behind a fence, inviting neighbours and passers-by for a game on the asphalt road.

For the last six years, Brett Young, a youth worker and occasional shoe salesperson at Hype, has lived amongst the suburbia-lite low-rise after moving into share house independence and out of his parents’ house in Golden Grove.

At that stage, the rationale behind Brett’s transition into the city was purely mathematical.

“I was spending $100 on taxis to get home,” he says.

“It’s like a $50 cab ride. If I go out once, it’s $50; if I go out twice, it’s $100. You pay rent for the same price as two cabs and also bus fare to get to and from work.”

Proximity to the CBD and all its amenities was one thing, but once he’d settled into the street, he found that Blackburn had a lot of the perks usually associated with the ‘burbs.

“There’s no hustle and bustle, like if you were living on Currie Street or something. It’s very much like living in Parkside almost,” Brett says.

“Coming from the suburbs where everyone’s got a bigger property and space, you just get the ‘Hi, Bye’ as you drive out of your driveway. I guess, living in that same suburb and house for 17 years or something like that, it’s all I knew.

“[Here] there’s little things, like I’ll be doing the hedge and whatnot, and [someone] will come out and be like ‘Oh, rather than standing on a bin, why don’t you use our stepladder?’”

The street is populated by young and old, small families and share houses, long-term owner-occupiers and at least one Airbnb property.

Kath Duncan, a school volunteer, moved onto the street seven years ago, and it was a welcome change to her experience living and working in Reading, in the UK.

“I think I had one cup of coffee with someone in the four years I was there. One cup of coffee with one of the people I worked with, and that was it!” she says.

“As soon as I moved in there were four ladies in the street that said ‘Would you like to join us for walking over to Victoria Park for coffee?’ They did that for about a year, so yeah, a very, very cohesive group on this street, in many ways.”

Every year, a Blackburn Street get-together is held in the Parklands at the end of the lane, organised by the street’s most forthright tenants, where all attendees are asked to bring a dish, and a year’s worth of neighbourly small talk is extended to an entire afternoon.

Brett is yet to attend an event, because “it’s always a Sunday, so I’m either at work or in bed,” he says.

But, just like the offer from the neighbourhood basketball ring, the invitation is always there.