The storylines in Slumlord Millionaire, the documentary about the struggle of New York City tenants and homeowners confronting predatory real estate interests’ fast-gentrifying neighborhoods that is opening in theaters in New York today, are disturbing.

The youngest son of the Bravo family in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, struggles with asthma, like over 300,000 other New York children, his condition deeply connected to the mold and rodent droppings that the landlord has refused to remedy. The residents of Chinatown, one of the last working-class neighborhoods in Manhattan, fight both neglectful landlords and the takeover of their community by developers of luxury real estate. Janina Davis’s experience as a black woman scammed out of her home that was supposed to provide her with security is so common that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor coined the term “predatory inclusion” to describe the phenomenon.

At its most optimistic, Slumlord Millionaire highlights the power of tenant organizing. The Bravo family and other tenants play core roles in the passage of the Asthma Free Housing Act, which requires landlords to address mold and rodent infestation. And they ultimately win a ruling that required their landlord to make repairs and stop harassing them. Chinatown residents come together to resist developers’ plans for hundred-story glass skyscrapers in their neighborhood.

But the film’s core theme is the enormous social cost that comes with the United States’ commitment to treating housing as a wealth-building commodity, rather than as an essential need and human right.

The brazen toxicity of billionaire developers is demonstrated by the experience of Moumita Ahmed, who lives with her parents in a rent-stabilized apartment in Jamaica, Queens. When Ahmed runs for city council on a pro-tenant platform, she faces hundreds of thousands of dollars spent in shameless attack ads. The ads were funded in significant part by Stephen Ross, one of the two hundred richest people in the world, the owner of the NFL Miami Dolphins, and a billionaire who famously did not pay any federal taxes for more than a decade.

Even more disturbing is the success those wealthy real estate interests have had in weaponizing the government to further their displacement schemes. The local housing courts that host and fast-track the removal of renters are referred to here by legal aid lawyers as “eviction mills.”

New York’s notorious 421-a tax–break program is revealed to be directing billions of dollars to the landlords that kick out longtime renters to build luxury towers, a local iteration of the national tax policies that enrich luxury housing developers like Ross and Donald Trump. “The 421-a program cost the city of New York City $1.7 billion in the last fiscal year. That money could have been put towards building deeply affordable housing. Instead, it supports luxury housing.” Michelle de la Uz, executive director of Fifth Avenue Committee, says in the film.

A Manhattan Chinatown resident speaking at a demonstration was more blunt: “It is unconscionable that the government is paying these developers to destroy our communities.”

Ironically, a better approach is usually within sight of these corporate-welfare buildings. New York City’s public housing programs are far from perfect, but housing policy experts like Nicholas Dagen Bloom have held them up as multigenerational success stories. At its best, New York City public housing has approximated the shining social housing models already established in places like Vienna and Singapore, and actively being planned in Hawaii and California.

But more typical of the US housing story is the struggle of working-class renters and homeowners of color as depicted in Slumlord Millionaire, in stories that have been replicated for generations. “Our whole country is built on the theft of land from Native Americans and the theft of labor from African Americans. So what we are seeing with real estate fraud is just a continuation of that,” says one of the attorneys representing Davis. Davis herself connects the through-line of racist appropriation of property to redlining and, now, to deed theft.

Slumlord Millionaire does a service by shining a spotlight on these injustices. But maybe its greater contribution is lifting up the tenants who are fighting back.

Tenants vastly outnumber wealthy landlords, and the organizing depicted in Slumlord Millionaire is being replicated in places like Bozeman, Montana, Kansas City, and Louisville, along with New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The real estate developers’ attacks on Ahmed sank her city council campaign. But her vow near the close of the film is heartening: “There are always going to be people who stand up to corporate power and corruption, and they are gonna be attacked for it. Stephen Ross can bury me, but others will come.”