TV REVIEWS : Battling a Slumlord on ‘Hope Street’

Pamela Cohen’s low-budget “Hope Street” documentary fits nicely into the scheme of “Life & Times,” the KCET-TV Channel 28 series that taps segments of Los Angeles rarely granted exposure on the city’s other news and public-affairs programs.

Hosted and reported by “Life & Times” co-host Ruben Martinez, “Hope Street” traces the struggle of Latinos to force a slumlord to upgrade the run-down apartment house that they share with rats and roaches. In doing so, with the assistance of tenant activists, these people face a wall of government bureaucracy in addition to the cruel indifference of the slumlord, who at one point in this 1992 case is sentenced by authorities to spend 30 days in one of his own crumbly buildings while making repairs.

The case was reported on local TV then, but not from the perspective of the tenants, whose message here--an important one--is that organized advocacy is a powerful weapon for everyone, but especially on behalf of an underclass facing seemingly insurmountable odds.

Unfortunately, despite much of this conflict being on the public record, the offending slumlord is neither named nor shown in an identifiable way here, a condition he insisted upon in exchange for being interviewed.

An even bigger flaw is the documentary’s failure to defog the murkiness it creates when a tenant advocate mentions the “rights” of illegal immigrant tenants and says that it’s “illegal” for slumlords to threaten them with exposure if they complain about conditions.

Do undocumented non-citizens have the same tenant rights as citizens? And is it really unlawful to report an illegal immigrant under the above circumstances? The lack of illumination here is all the more dramatic given California’s enduring divisive debate over Proposition 187.

* “Hope Street” airs at 7:30 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.