In this week’s ArtVoice:
Documenting a Scam
by Peter Koch
Everyone knows that countless East Side neighborhoods are falling apart, but few understand how or why. That’s why it’s so important that the people who are working daily to combat the problem get a wide audience. Now that’s possible, thanks to a new film documentary by Marc Odien, Flipped, which hopes to uncover one of the biggest problems, real estate flipping, and expose it to as many people as possible.
A centuries-old practice, flipping regained popularity in the late 1980s as a way for (mostly unscrupulous) real estate investors, especially novices, to generate cash quickly. Flipping property is not necessarily a bad thing. However, in Buffalo’s case, these investors are willing to profit at any price, even when it means gutting the communities on whose labor the city was built and killing people’s livelihoods. Even worse, the process has sped up recently thanks to eBay.
