John Oliver on homelessness: ‘It is not the housed’s comfort that needs to be prioritized’
On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver delved into the issue of homelessness in the US, which has been on the rise, particularly since the upheavals of the pandemic; experts project that the pandemic recession will increase chronic homelessness by 49% over the next four years, and cause twice the homelessness as the Great Recession.
Yet “far too often, stories focusing on homelessness are presented solely through the lens of how it affects those with homes, when in reality it is obviously the people without them who need the real help,” said Oliver.
“The story of homelessness in this country is grounded in a failure of perception compounded by failures of policy,” he continued. That policy, at least in its modern context, dates back to Ronald Reagan, who “came to power at a time when homelessness was increasing, and made the problem far worse by cutting programs for the poor and slashing housing subsidies by 75%”, and once lamented in a 1984 interview “the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice”.
“That notion that homelessness isn’t related to economic policy, but simply reflects the problems of the individuals experiencing it, still informs the way it’s discussed today,” Oliver said.
There are, he continued, numerous reasons why someone might be without housing: medical debt, job loss, fleeing domestic violence, kicked out of their homes for their sexuality, being recently released from prison, or just because housing costs are rising much faster than wages.
Given that 70% of low-income families are spending half their income on rent, and only 37 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, “it doesn’t take much for people to suddenly find themselves without stable housing,” said Oliver.
Yet focus tends to be on homelessness’s impact on housed residents; Oliver pointed to numerous stories about human feces next to homeless encampments in Los Angeles, a city which before the pandemic had only 16 mobile toilet stations, hauled away at night, for its 36,000 homeless residents. “So the next time you complain about human shit in the street, maybe think about what it would be like if someone padlocked your bathroom every night,” Oliver said. “You too would suddenly be getting really creative really fast.”
The lack of public restrooms in many cities is one symptom of what
Oliver explained as “the impulse behind many local policies surrounding unhoused people” – not to help them, but “to punish them for their existence and keep them out of sight”, such as hostile architecture designed to keep people from sitting or lying down, or in the case of one Florida city, blasting the children’s song “Raining Tacos” to prevent homeless people from sleeping at a pavilion at night.
In addition, local ordinances that criminalize the behavior of homeless people – panhandling, sitting down on public or private property – have landed many unhoused people in a cycle of incarceration. “You cannot arrest someone out of homelessness in the same way you can’t sing someone out of bankruptcy,” Oliver argued. “One thing doesn’t remotely lead to the other, and you’re just going to end up making things worse.”
As for solutions, Oliver had a straightforward answer: give unhoused people homes. “Some will say sure, giving the homeless homes is an obvious solution, but before that they need to be sober and have a job, but it’s just not that simple,” he explained. “Set aside that dealing with sobriety or your mental health issues is hard enough when you are not living on the streets, getting a job is often if not contingent on, at least aided by having an address.” Which is why advocates support an approach called housing first, which prioritizes getting people a place to live along with services such as mental health care, counseling and job training. Such a program led the number of homeless veterans to drop from 74,000 in 2010 to 38,000 in 2018.
Supportive housing programs are expensive, he argued, but not as expensive as current approaches to homelessness, such as incarceration. “If your primary argument against housing for the homeless was purely monetary, congratulations, your concerns have been answered. Also, a pre-congratulations for being visited by three ghosts this upcoming Christmas Eve.”
But funding is not the only problem – another obstacle to supportive housing programs is the nimby problem – Not In My Backyard, when residents support a program in theory, just not in practice when it’s near their home.
Oliver derided nimbyism as unhelpful self-absorption – “it is not the housed’s comfort that needs to be prioritized right now. So if you’re wondering why homelessness continues to get worse in this country, one reason is that there are a lot of people, even liberals, who believe that homelessness is a personal failing, poverty can be avoided and their own good fortune makes them not only better than the unhoused, but more worthy of comfort. It is basically Reagan’s attitude from a Whole Foods crowd.”
Oliver said he didn’t want to oversimplify the logistics, as “it will take a massive commitment in infrastructure, funding and resources. But the very first step here is a collective change of perceptions.
“Basically, we need to stop being dicks and assuming that the unhoused are a collection of drug addict criminals who’ve chosen this life for themselves,” he concluded, “instead of people suffering the inevitable consequences of gutted social programs and a nationwide divestment from affordable housing.”