In a certain sense, yes: the narrator of The Slum treats the tenement as a living organism, which is born, wakes, defends itself, divides, catches fire and rebuilds itself, and follows it with as much attention as any resident. That is why many readers call it the central character.
The image appears already in the first chapter: from the soggy, steaming earth of Botafogo "something began to wriggle, to seethe, to grow, a world, a living thing", which seemed to sprout from that mire "like larvae in manure". In chapter III, "it was five o'clock in the morning and the tenement was waking, opening, not its eyes, but its countless doors and windows in a row", and the text speaks of "the animal pleasure of existing" felt by those who wake there.
The tenement also acts as a single body. When the police try to enter, after Firmo's razor attack, the residents set up a barricade at the gate, and none of them informs on anyone afterward: the "spirit of collectivity" binds them "in an iron circle". Later, the rivalry with Cabeça-de-Gato splits it into carapicus and cabeças-de-gato, and when the rival capoeiras invade and the fire starts, "there were no longer Brazilians and Portuguese there, there was only one party".
After the fire, the tenement rebuilds itself, clean, whitewashed and bearing the name of an avenue, and becomes, in the narrator's words, a "terrible machine that never stopped", which "became aristocratic". But the book does not let the tenement decide on its own: the one who says what it becomes is its owner, João Romão. The tenement grows like a living thing, and the scenes show that what steers it is one man's interest.