VOCES – Slumlord Millionaire airs Sunday, August 3 at 7PM

Winner of the 2024 DOC NYC Audience Award, Slumlord Millionaire pulls back the curtain on New York City’s ruthless gentrification and the nationwide housing crisis. With Manhattan rents skyrocketing to an average of $5,000 a month, the film reveals how landlords systematically push out long-term tenants through calculated neglect—denying basic repairs, cutting off heat, and ignoring toxic mold and vermin infestations—all to deregulate apartments and flip them for massive profits. The human cost is staggering: families displaced, communities dismantled, and a city losing its cultural heart.

Through four gripping stories, directors Ellen Martinez and Steph Ching expose the crisis. In Sunset Park, the Bravo family’s 15-year battle against their landlord’s neglect led to New York’s Asthma Free Housing Act, yet their fight continues. Chinatown’s working-class tenants resist luxury “Megatowers” while their landlord pampers vacant units for wealthy newcomers. Former Vogue model Janina Davis lost her Brooklyn brownstone to a predatory deed theft scam targeting Black homeowners. And in Queens, activist Moumita Ahmed’s City Council run against corrupt landlords triggered a million-dollar smear campaign by threatened developers.

A searing indictment of greed and policy failures, Slumlord Millionaire is an urgent exposé and a rallying cry—spotlighting the New Yorkers fighting to reclaim their right to home and community. This is essential viewing for anyone who believes housing is a human right.