Slumlord Millionaire: Housing is a Human Right

The New York City housing market is a shitshow. It favors the rich, the plentiful at the expense of largely the people who've made this city what it is culturally—immigrants, renters, working class people black, brown, Asian, and white too. This is very well known, but I'm not sure many of us who either don’t live there or who live through that struggle see how massive the inequity is when you look at it from the bigger picture. Cringy title aside, Slumlord Millionaire pulls zero punches outlining that, the rage and unflinching hope for justice NYC residents yearn for.

Across five boroughs, the film passes through the lives of these everyday New Yorkers, their hurdles examined and felt, deeply, out through the screen. The Bravo family and their 15 year battle against devious landlords; Chinatown residents priced out for luxury towers; city council hopeful Moumita Ahmed whose housing plans were ravaged by real estate billionaires; former supermodel Janina Davis and the many other black building owners who get their residences swindled out from under them by fraudsters. Documentarians Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez place these stories under a microscope so as to zoom out into the macro of what they actually mean in conversation with each other, systematically speaking. 

We get glimpses into how taxing it can be for these families and individuals, the process of keeping records, receipts (sometimes duffel bags full of them) for court dates that might not come, or of the very aggressive measures landlords take—ignoring repairs, switching off the heat and gas, etc—to make a profit and block out someone's generational livelihood. Checks and balances are exposed for its failures and the toll incurred by human beings trying to live where larger powers see a personal playground. For the older generation it's a fitful reminder of how precarious housing is. And for the younger gen, in a time when TikTok feeds filter the New York experience as an aspirational fantasy, something like Slumlord Millionaire is essentially invaluable by exposing the faultlines, the sinewy anatomy of folks in between the “aesthetic”.

Gentrification is an easy catch all for any issue of housing going on through the boroughs, it's applicable, but it often obscures the severe layers of abuse that go on citywide: price gouging in Chinatown, gerrymandering in Jamaica, Queens, tenant abuse in Sunset Park, the deed theft all across Brooklyn. The doc is smart enough to notice the forest for the trees without denying the trees their time in the sun to soak in the individual costs the rent crisis has created. Not just systems and statistics: it’s real people in flux, these are whole communities in trouble. Ching and Martinez visualize how expensive racism is through the anecdotes, residents whose day to day are screwed up magnificently for billions of dollars the city will just fumble to keep up these disparities between class, race, monetary lines. Nevertheless it's an invigorating film, because no matter the pain or suffering, it still ends on as much a note of action as it can: people will fight, people will thrive, they will throw hands for the safety they deserve in their own homes. Housing is a human right, unequivocally.

Catch it when you can, in U.S. theaters June 6th.