Como dizer "Cortiço" em inglês

Pelo que pude entender, cortiço neste contexto está se referindo a uma casa muito simples, em condições precárias. Para isso, existe o termo hovel, cuja definição em inglês é a seguinte:

Hovel: a small, poorly built and often dirty house. [Merriam-Webster]

Exemplo do Google Books (Victoria Twead - 2014 - ‎Travel)

Our house was a hovel when we first moved into it and it seemed that the villagers felt sorry for us. [A nossa casa era um cortiço quando mudamos para ela, e parecia que o pessoal do vilarejo tinha pena de nós.]

Exemplo da pergunta (O.P):

Éramos muito pobres. A nossa casa era um cortiço.
We were very poor. Our house was a hovel.

Bons estudos.

Eu diria tenement ou tenement house. Por questões até culturais o design dum cortiço brasileiro pode ser diferente dum inglês mas a ideia de precariedade e de familias diferentes vivendo num mesmo terreno se aplica aqui.

1 A run-down apartment house barely meeting minimal standards.

2. Also called ten′ement house`. A run-down and often overcrowded apartment house, esp. In a poor section of a large city.

Cortiço = beehive

I'd say TENEMENT

Beehive city is less used nowadays, beehive world is used sometimes referring to the social conditions. In America, once they mentioned "rat cities" (again, referring to social conditions, while working to morph them in more urbanized house 'projects')
The fiction novel "O Cortiço" was translated "A Brazilian Tenement" and then "Slum", beehive might have been used within the story as tenement dwellings. It is sometimes used in reviews, though. Looks like it doesn't go well to a novel cover, perhaps it was like to put something like "hive of activity" on it... Anyway "slum" and "A Brazilian tenement" certainly was a way to euphemize it somehow.
"Beehive" was coined, they say; inspired in the fact of bees being of work and industry of the bees.