The Ninth Floor

A millionaire rents out a spare room to make ends meet. Years later he’s one of fifteen addicts sharing a three-room apartment in Manhattan, the utilities barely working, everything sold for drugs. Photographer Jessica Dimmock documented it in a series called The Ninth Floor.

The trajectory is what gets me. Not because it’s a cautionary tale—it’s simpler than that. He needed the money, so he rented the room. The tenant was addicted. So he was around it. He didn’t plan to become addicted. He just lived with someone who was, and you can’t undo that proximity. More people arrive. The apartment fills. The logic compounds until there’s no logic left, just the fact of it.

The photographs don’t sensationalize. They show the wear on the furniture and the bodies, the way people arrange themselves when they’ve stopped expecting anything. That ordinariness is worse than shock. It just is what it is.

I think about the economics sometimes—how a man with assets becomes a man with none. That’s not mysterious; addiction does that. But the speed. One decision creates conditions for everything after. You rent a room to a stranger. The stranger is an addict. Now you’re in the problem.