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.

Flipping simply means the purchase and quick resale at a higher price of a piece of property. In distressed neighborhoods like the East Side, though, the seller usually inflates the house’s worth without making any physical improvements to justify the price increase. The end results of such a sale are never good. Often the buyer realizes the house has such little value that it’s not worth the trouble to make expensive improvements, so it is demolished at a cost of around $8,000 to the buyer. A worse scenario frequently seen in Buffalo is when an uninformed, low-income buyer receives a mortgage far exceeding the home’s value. Eventually they are forced to default on their mortgage, and their property is foreclosed. Another equally distressing occurrence is when a buyer quickly realizes he’s purchased a lemon and immediately dumps the house at a reduced price to cut his or her losses.

After discovering they’ve been scammed, however, most buyers allow houses to remain empty and decay. Eventually they’re put back on the market and are repeatedly flipped—a cyclical process—until the City finally decides the house must be demolished, leaving another scar on another block. Often times, several houses are flipped on a single block, starting a chain reaction that kills an entire neighborhood.

Though countless articles have been written about the situation, Odien realized that pictures speak a thousand words, and he thinks his documentary will help make the difference. Odien worked closely with housing activist and housing court liaison Michele Johnson on the film, and she often takes center stage. Johnson has been a bulldog on the issue, unflagging in her attempts to bring unscrupulous real estate flippers to justice.

“I think people will be enraged when they see it,” Johnson says. “They’re going to come in and say, ‘What the hell is this?’”

Johnson and Odien spent about a week filming in March in and around the Fillmore District and parts of the West Side. During these portions of the film, they have the advantage of taking viewers firsthand into the bombed-out neighborhoods that they wouldn’t otherwise see, of listening to the people who are forced to live in these neighborhoods. They put a human face on what is otherwise simply a complicated, abstract problem.

Odien, a former Channel 2 videographer, originally planned only a 20-minute video short about flipping, but once Johnson took him out on the streets, he realized the need for more. What followed was hour upon hour of filming, and interviews with City Housing Court Judge Henry Nowak, housing inspector Tracy Krug and Mayor Byron Brown.

The end result is more than just a polemic about the terrible people who prey on our poorest neighborhoods; instead it raises important questions and proposes common-sense solutions to them.

“We don’t have all the answers,” admits Johnson. “But I do hope we get more people that say, ‘We have to stop this’ and we find a way to stop it.”

The film may have already found an important audience in Mayor Brown. It’s rumored that in his interview for the documentary, Brown promises to make Buffalo a leader in anti-flipping practices.

“I still do believe that things are going to get better,” Johnson says. “We’re at the very bottom. The only way to go is up from here.” We can only hope that she’s right.

Flipped premieres June 8 at 6pm and 7:30pm at the Adam Mickiewicz Dramatic Circle on Fillmore Ave. Immediately following each screening will be a panel discussion with Johnson, Nowak and Krug. Admission is $5.