It is strange to spend your Sunday evening watching somewhere that you occasionally picked up a cup of coffee be razed to the ground on television, along with the entire suburb that contained it.

On Sunday, SBS televised the destruction of one of the joints where I’d stop in for coffee while I was in Phnom Penh. The flattening of Dey Krahom, documented in last week’s episode of Dateline, was directly opposite my plush, air-conditioned office. I could stare out the window into the barely organised maze of houses while I worked. I still recognise the remains of those houses as they were being knocked down. Some mornings I’d drop into Dey Krahom for a coffee from one of the roadside vendors, more often than not, when I forgot to get petrol for my motorbike and ground to an embarrassing halt.

There was a small roadside breakfast vendor there who cooked the classic Cambodian breakfast of flame-grilled, marinated  pork, pickles and rice (bai sach chrouk); and for a few cents also did overroasted black coffee thickened and sweetened with condensed milk.

I never really developed a taste for the coffee but a glass of the local brew was one brutal hit of caffeine and sugar in the early morning. The pork and rice in Dey Krahom was nothing special. But there was a well-stocked petrol stand next to it.

Dey Krahom also housed a concentration of mobile fruit vendors who parked their flatbed fruit trolleys there during the day. In the late afternoons, a truck would arrive and divide up a selection of seasonal fruit amongst the vendors who would then head out into the evening to hawk their wares along Phnom Penh’s riverfront until late into the night. Somewhere towards the centre of the suburb was a small, shambolic market – official reports document 200 stallholders – but I had only ever skirted around the edges of it. I probably missed something.

Apart from the “systematic lack of due process and procedural protections; inadequate compensation; lack of effective remedies for communities facing eviction; excessive use of force; and harassment, intimidation and criminalization of NGOs and lawyers working on this issue”, I wonder how much street food and street life is being squeezed out of the city in the process of evictions. Part of the charm of the Phnom Penh are the array of informal food vendors; the families eking out a living behind a pork-and-rice stand and small market stalls. Poverty is in no way charming but all of my favoured vendors had homes (and presumably, land title). Many were doing well from their trade. Many were in the suburbs like Boeung Kak and Dey Krahom which have been destroyed and their residents pushed out to the uninhabitable edges of town.