In the show “Le Petit Journal”, by Yann Barthès, on Canal, then, still with the latter when he migrated to the TF1 group, in “Quotidien”, on TMC, Martin Weill stood out for his reports on the United States, particularly when Donald Trump became the Republican candidate, then the winner of the 2016 presidential election.
Like Hugo Clément – his classmate at the Lille Higher School of Journalism – the young man (now aged 36) rose to prominence, gained notoriety and was assigned a time slot prime time on TMC, “Les Reportages de Martin Weill”, which hosts his investigations.
Here it is again in New York, where, since the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, some residents with limited incomes are today made precarious by the increase (sometimes double) in unprotected rents. and real estate prices, which have soared 35% in two years.
This issue, entitled “New York, the end of the dream? “, filled with numerous testimonies from journalists and specialists, begins among the ultra-rich, with the inevitable star real estate agent Fredrik Eklund, a vain hunk known less for his short career in gay porn than for the reality TV series Million Dollar Listing New York, since 2012 on the Bravo channel.
Various situations of precariousness
We say that Martin Weill is following in the footsteps of the luxury real estate boom in New York, symbolized by the buildings designed by well-known architects on Billionaires’ Row, on 57th Street. , or along the High Line, a once disreputable neighborhood that has become the most expensive in New York. But this is to better contrast with the most interesting part of the documentary, which reports on various situations of precariousness. Thus we follow a young homeless man, thrown onto the street by a landlord who is suing him and unable to repay his student loan, as well as a young actor who attends Broadway auditions – but who works as a restaurant waiter and shares an apartment in Manhattan with a roommate.
The third part of the documentary shows the inevitable gentrification of neighborhoods formerly exclusively inhabited by Latinos and African-Americans, driven out by rising rents or the inaccessibility of new construction. The word is dropped by an activist born in the South Bronx: “They are white settlers. »
Not forgetting the asylum-seeking migrants who arrive by bus in a city where the law requires them to be provided with shelter. This led the city’s (black and Democratic) mayor, Eric Adams, to cause an outcry among the city’s solidarity associations by announcing, on September 8, that the migratory crisis was going to “destroy New York.” The end of the dream or the beginning of the nightmare?