eyeodyssey | The Death Of A Home (Preview)

"The Death Of A Home - Finale (St. John Passion)" (Watch on YouTube)

A sequence from my documentary on gentrification, The Death Of A Home.

As with Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage, The Death Of A Home was shot simultaneously during a personal experience with gentrification. After being gentrified out of midtown, we had lived just barely under two years in the apartment depicted before it was announced to tenants on Halloween night (with the building owners stopping by door-to-door knowing that it would be the night that all the tenants would be indoors to sign the notice) that all the apartments would be emptied out and converted to condos. While we were at first given the legal standard of a hundred days to move, the renovators later narrowed the time-frame to 30 days with the vague threat that if we stuck any longer that our lives would be “uncomfortable”. On the other end, however, other tenants were forced to stay longer than we had. One woman rented her space for a year-long lease just before the building started renovation, I also heard from one tenant around that same time that the owners threatened legal action on them if they tried to leave their lease early. The handling of the building renovation was also handled with a similar dismissal to the tenants. Workers demanded several times that I stop filming on the grounds of (what was at the time) my home, with the leader of the biohazard crew at one point taking video of me on the threat that he’d have me kicked out of the apartment.