Push review – a whirlwind tour of rocketing rents and personal tragedy
4 / 5
stars4 out of 5 stars.
This
powerful documentary, about a UN investigator travelling the planet to get to
the bottom of the global housing crisis, lays bare a $217 trillion scandal
Oliver
Wainwright
@ollywainwright
Tue 10 Sep
2019 17.39 BSTLast modified on Wed 11 Sep 2019 11.07 BST
‘Idon’t believe that capitalism itself is
hugely problematic,” says Leilani Farha, as she marches along a pavement in
Harlem, New York. The UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing is on her way
to visit a sprawling low-income housing project that was recently acquired by a
private equity fund, leading to massive rent hikes and probable evictions. “Is
unbridled capitalism in an area that is a human right problematic? Yes.”
The
conflict between rights and profits lies at the heart of a thought-provoking
documentary, Push, which follows Farha’s forays into the bleak depths of the
global housing crisis, as she attempts to unpick exactly how we got here. In
the Harlem estate she meets a man who already spends 90% of his income on his
rent. Soon, his two-bedroom flat will cost $3,600 (£,2920) a month, and he will
be forced to move.
It is a
story repeated from Toronto to Berlin, Stockholm and Seoul – via London’s
cleansed Heygate Estate and the remains of the Grenfell Tower – where Swedish
director Fredrik Gertten accompanies Farha on a whirlwind tour of personal
tragedy and corporate greed, as she unearths familiar tales of poor residents
being forcibly evicted to make way for luxury investment units to be sold to wealthy
overseas buyers.
Her task is
an unenviable one. On the one hand is a $217tn (£176tn) global property
business, worth more than twice the world’s total GDP. On the other is the
human right to adequate housing, which is referred to in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and recognised in international human rights law
under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of
1966. This law has been flagrantly breached by practically every UN member
state ever since. In the middle, providing an engagingly human presence on
camera, is Farha, the plucky 50-year-old lawyer and housing advocate from
Ottawa. “I’m 5ft 2in, I’m from this nowhere place, and I’m trying to make a
huge difference globally,” she says, looking out of a window at blurred ranks
of high-rise condos. “I’m trying to change an entire conversation that’s embedded
in the way people live all around the world.”
Along the
way, providing sage guidance in her quest, are the voices of sociologist Saskia
Sassen and economist Joseph Stiglitz, heavyweight academics who dispense
bullets of wisdom. Sassen has spent her career analysing the invisible global
flows between world cities. She is frank: “This is not at all about housing.
The buildings function as assets.”
She places
the blame firmly the finance industry, which “sells something it does not have”,
and which to do so “needs to invent brilliant instruments that allow it to
invade other sectors” – mechanisms that are sadly beyond the scope of the film
to explain. (It could have done with a few rapid-fire explainers, in the style
of The Big Short). Sassen compares the financial industry to mining: “Once it
has extracted what it needs [from housing], it doesn’t care what happens to the
rest.”
The Nobel
laureate Stiglitz illuminates exactly how the world of private equity invaded
property thanks to the 2008 financial crisis, in a process that was facilitated
by the US government. “Rather than helping the homeowners who were losing their
homes, [the government] sided with the banks. They encouraged foreclosures to
clean up the books, gave the money to the hedge funds and private equity firms,
who then bought the distressed assets to make money. It’s the way the 2008
crisis has played an important role in increasing wealth inequality.”
Private
equity firm Blackstone emerges as the chief villain of the piece, popping up in
different guises around the world as the faceless Bond baddie lurking behind
impenetrable walls of smoked glass. In the years after the financial crisis,
Blackstone spent about $9.6bn (£7.75bn), hoovering up thousands of properties
across the US, and is accused of hiking rents and ruthlessly pursuing eviction
for nonpayment.
Blackstone
was the company behind the acquisition of the Harlem project, while Farha also
traces its tentacles to Sweden, where it is already the biggest private owner
of low-income housing, having only entered the country in 2014. She visits a
housing estate in Uppsala that the company is currently upgrading – though
Blackstone strongly deny the claim, made in the film, that they have raised
rents by around 50% in the process. Sadly, a momentous meeting between Farha
and Blackstone’s head of real estate falls through, so the company’s side of
the story is absent. (Blackstone say that they spend billions renovating homes,
that they are responsible property managers, and that tenants have a high level
of satisfaction.)
The
iniquitous role of tax havens gets a look-in, too, elucidated by Roberto
Saviano, the Italian author of Gomorrah, the book-turned-TV-series that exposed
the inner workings of the mafia. Now living under police protection and driven
around in a bulletproof car, he explains how offshore companies work in the
property money-laundering business. “You buy things with legal money – a
restaurant, hotel or houses – then you sell those properties to your company in
a tax haven. If you want to bring your dirty money back into your country, you
simply buy it from yourself at a much higher price than you paid.”
As a
result, he says, “companies don’t want inexpensive real estate. They want to
pay as much as possible, to be able to hide more money.” With prices topping
tens of millions for a townhouse, it won’t surprise many that London property
has become the ultimate industrial laundry for the world’s dodgy cash.
Just as you
expect the documentary to reach a dazzling denouement, it rather fizzles out,
concluding with a round-table meeting of mayors pledging to do a bit better.
Nor is it ever explained what the UN’s powers to enforce the right to housing
might be, apart from Farha writing angry letters to the member states. The
passionate special rapporteur is shown presenting her findings to a chamber of
delegates, who fiddle with their phones as she details the catalogue of
catastrophes.
Governments
must wake up. The transformation of cities into playgrounds for the rich, while
homelessness continues to rise, is not an inevitability. It is the result of
structural economic policies, which can be changed – if the will exists.
• Push
premieres at the Barbican, London, on 11 September, as part of the Architecture
Foundation’s Architecture on Film programme, followed by a Q&A with
director Fredrik Gertten
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