From NIMBY to criminalized napping, John Oliver hits anti-homeless policies where they live
Making homelessness illegal doesn't make homelessness disappear
TV News John Oliver
In his main story on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver tackled the growing homelessness crisis in America. According to the surely undercounted government estimate, over a half-million people are currently unhoused, with the economic effects of the ongoing pandemic all but ensuring that number will grown for the fourth consecutive year, and Oliver played local news clips of how homeowners are dealing with the attendant problems caused by burgeoning homeless populations in their area. As one woman in Austin, Texas is shown explaining, “Every time I have to pick up human shit, my liberalness gets lowered.” It’s an understandable sentiment Oliver nonetheless skewered with his typically big-picture examination of just how badly we as a society have failed to comprehend the scale of the homelessness issue, while simultaneously punishing those most in need of, say, a safe place to take a shit.
Sure, as Oliver notes, nobody likes human excrement. But when, for example, Los Angeles locks up its facilities during the nighttime, and when there are only 55 such relief stations left to service the some 36,000 unhoused human beings in the city, well, the shit is going to pile up somewhere. Oliver examined how the predominant municipal approach of criminalizing everything associated with homelessness is, indeed, some deeply offensive shit. From spiked and partitioned public spaces to discourage sleeping and sitting, to playing “Baby Shark” and that “Raining Tacos” song (which Oliver admitted is a bop) all night to ensure hideous, auto-tuned nightmares, Oliver lambasted the idea that we can “arrest someone out of homelessness.”
And don’t get him started on the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) types who inevitably swarm public hearings whenever affordable housing or homeless shelters are brought up. It’s really a good idea to think twice before standing up in front of local news cameras to spout your narrow-minded and uncharitable thoughts on the less fortunate. You never know when a sardonic Brit with an Emmy-winning late-night show will make you famous for proclaiming your distaste that people “who are not of the same class as us” will move into your neighborhood. (And, as Oliver notes, you should really not imagine that prefacing your NIMBY nonsense with, “I’m definitely not racist and not a bigot, but…” will scrub the stink off of you.)
But it’s not just securely uncharitable (predominantly white) homeowners who came in for Oliver’s cheeky wrath, as the host looked back at the likes of Ronald Reagan famously decrying people being homeless “by choice,” and once-beloved Dr. Drew Pinsky’s comments calling the homelessness crisis “a hoax” as emblematic of the larger problem of stigmatizing the unhoused. Listing off the multifarious ways people can become homeless (addiction, mental health, domestic violence, job loss, being thrown out of your house for being LGBTQ, medical debt, post prison-release bias), Oliver scoffed at the whole “up by your own bootstraps” mentality of those smugly assured that they are better than their homeless neighbors because they’ve been more fortunate. Calling America’s current expanding homeless population “a failure of pubic policy we have made,” Oliver mocked the idea that the prevailing approach “to punish them for their existence and keep them out of sight” is typically both cruel and shortsighted.
“Your discomfort is enough to disqualify a person from the American dream,” Oliver quoted formerly homeless mother Kianna K. Scott’s letter to her local paper, in response to the NIMBYs in her town. As Oliver noted, the stigmatization of those most in need often crosses that supposedly intractable red-blue divide, with the most liberal enclaves often shown as hotbeds of dismissively Scrooge-like sentiments and draconian laws against allowing homeless people to literally sit down, camp out, or have to attend to their inconvenient bodily functions. (Again, if you’re planning on basing your on-camera NIMBY pitch on the hypothetical economic consequences for your neighborhood’s sushi joint, perhaps reexamine your life.)
Of course, Oliver notes, there are proven methods to more beneficially and humanely address the fact that hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children are without shelter, but that would involve shifting resources away from bulldozing homeless encampments and jailing people for sleeping. And, as Oliver notes, that, in turn, would involve Americans abandoning their perspective that people less fortunate than they are somehow less worthy of comfort, or that homelessness indicates moral failing. Or, to put it more succinctly, Oliver says, “We need to stop being dicks.” Funny how many of Last Week Tonight’s stories end up at the same conclusion.
52 Comments
I grew tired of Oliver’s schtick a while ago. His bread is buttered with the horrors he uncovers for a certain demographic that wouldn’t know about these subjects any other way than from the safety of their expensive open-plan homes. He’s talking to the descendants of the white middle class who watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Sundays, circa 1970. His hilarity over The “Raining Tacos” bit just adds insult to injury.I find his feigned naivety gross and, imo, he’s only reinforcing that kind of attitude in his viewers: “Let’s all get safely outraged tonight then roll softly back into our indifference at bed-time.”
F..K You, take it back to parler boomer
Eh, I dig Oliver overall, but it helps to go into it with the following thoughts:1. The format works better with some topics than with others.2. It’s a half hour, and the “main story” is about 20 minutes, so it’s going to be a cursory walkthrough at best.3. We live in a country in which (for one example) R. Kelly only really faced justice as a result of public outcry on the back of a prime time docuseries. Anything that can help nudge the conversational needle is a plus, IMO.
Well it’s jammed in my head now.
I grew tired of your post within the first line. The guy wins awards for his journalism and work. Your entitled to your opinion, but you really think someone watching Mutual of Omaha (with Jack Perkins! which I know from MST3K) in 1970 is his audience?He also has, you know, done things: bought up and got rid of debt, opened websites to show how fucking stupid these folks are…is your thought he should just do nothing?
You are a deeply unpleasant person who seems to understand nothing about the modern world.
His bread is buttered with the horrors he uncovers for a certain demographic that wouldn’t know about these subjects any other way than from the safety of their expensive open-plan homes. How else are these people going to learn about these things?!? /s
He’s an (almost) newly Americanized One Percenter so, yeah, that tracks. Apparently he took advantage of some handy tax loopholes to pay for his $9.5 Million NYC penthouse. It’s pretty common for Brits to do a little personal colonizing once they get rich because taxes in the Mother Country are so high for the 1% (as I’m sure you’re aware). He’s just another player whose money manager likely voted republican.I wonder if he would be as popular if he hollered like that with a Chicago accent (sorry Chicago, but yeah).
Why do you idiot millennials hate success and worship failure?
Damn that’s fucked up if true.
THANK. YOU. I’ve never liked these guys, and you’ve nailed why. There are few things more profitable than plundering the rich veins of upper-middle class guilt, and this is pretty much what he does.What also gets me is the entirely prescriptive nature of these shows: the Talking Head Man on TV will Tell You What To Feel About Stuff, and the crude Pavlovian methods used to enforce that via strategic use of canned laughter.
“Prescriptive” is a perfect description. Oliver isn’t telling us anything that we don’t already know. It seems as though, like Trump, Oliver just found out about something and now we get his ‘takes.’ I never thought I’d support twitter, but the youths (and not so young) are affecting politics and policies via that medium more than this entertainer has done.
It’s demagoguery. It might be demagoguery in favour of good causes, but it’s demagoguery nonetheless. If you need some Mid-Atlantican on TV staring right at you on the couch to tell you “homelessness is bad” to figure out homelessness is bad, I’m going to assume you’re an idiot.
Eh, I’m guessing there are plenty of viewers who knew “homelessness is bad” but still learned something or felt something.Plus his chosen issue of the week isn’t always so….basic.He can be hard to watch sometimes, but I’m not gonna fault him for trying to bring attention to issues that matter.
Yeah, like…it’s an entertainment product, first and foremost. It’ll veer into eye-rolling territory, on occasion, as most shows tend to do.
It’s also more coverage than real news sites ever provide. Course, real news must be ‘unbiased’ as well and empathy is biased…
My frustration more stems from, “Oliver shouldn’t -need- to have a segment like this!!”
That’s right.He’s a sanctimonious, smug little know-it-all, telling other people how to be morally good, like he is.
Or rather, like he TELLS you he is.
Is this a laugh track moron?:https://www.lastweektickets.com/BTW, for the 18 months of the pandemic before the audience came back there was no laugh track at all on “LWT.” If he wasn’t doing it in front of an audience before the pandemic, there might’ve been a laugh track. But there WASN’T. Idiot millennial.
That’s ridiculous. Progressives don’t mindlessly start doing something because someone told them to. You sound like a Drumpf (what a cool name I came up with for Trump) supporter.
There must be some Daily Show producer responsible for gathering all of the on-air talent in one room and telling them “You are now officially the moral scolds of America. Don’t worry so much about being funny, just make sure you’re telling people the right way to think.”
He’s covering important issues, but he sucks because he presents it in a way to hit a demographic you dislike? Not sure what’s so offensive about the guy. How exactly should he handle things?
Hey now, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom was AWESOME
NIMBYs are pieces of shit. That is all.
I’m not a NIMBY because I can’t even afford to have a BY and am (perhaps shamefully) not really involved in local politics…but I do have some sympathy for homeowners who don’t want people pooping and shooting up and selling meth in their BY. If I owned a home, I wouldn’t want that either. ETA: I’m not saying it’s homeless people’s fault that rampant drug use and public defecation are the default state for homeless populations today. That is society/the government’s job to fix – without a massive societal investment in public mental health, substance treatment, etc, it seems unreasonable to expect homeowners to pick up the slack where the government has failed. I wonder whose agenda it serves to shift the conversation from “America has a poverty crisis that can only be solved by significant changes to our tax code and welfare state” to “Lmao it’s those selfish NIMBY homeowners’ fault, fuck them and their 3-car garage.”
I wonder whose agenda it serves to shift the conversation from “America has a poverty crisis that can only be solved by significant changes to our tax code and welfare state” to “Lmao it’s those selfish NIMBY homeowners’ fault, fuck them and their 3-car garage.” Here’s the thing: the NIMBYs I’m talking about are the ones who do not want to do *anything* to meaningfully address problems. Construction of a shelter or housing subdivision? Nope, not near ME. Tax increases to cover housing efforts? Nope, not my problem. Safe injection sites (thereby diverting addicts toward treatment and away from white picket fences)? How GHASTLY!In my experience, NIMBYs don’t have ideas, they don’t have desire to change anything, and they’d just plain rather problems just go away, thank you very much.
Sure, many NIMBYs are also social/fiscal conservatives who don’t want to solve the issue neither locally nor systemically. But a lot of “classical NIMBYs” (and this is a main point that Oliver focuses on in the segment) are actually urban liberals/progressives and upper-middle-class. If you told them, “we’re increasing your local taxes by 2% or whatever, and you’ll never have to pick up human feces in your lawn again”, I bet most would enthusiastically agree. But they’d also have to have faith that the government could actually use that money effectively to solve the problem – and that’s a level of trust that local govs from SF to NYC have not earned so far.
I mean, I never made an ideological distinction, because the mentality transcends ideology.Liberal or conservative, red or blue, the overriding impetus of a NIMBY is a unilateral “No, I don’t want it, and I’d rather not have to think about it!” Don’t care if they’re Cape Cod liberals blocking wind farms, or southern conservatives railing against an Islamic temple being built.
But a lot of “classical NIMBYs” (and this is a main point that Oliver
focuses on in the segment) are actually urban liberals/progressives and
upper-middle-class. If you told them, “we’re increasing your local taxes
by 2% or whatever, and you’ll never have to pick up human feces in your
lawn again”, I bet most would enthusiastically agree.I pointed out elsewhere that both notional groups of NIMBYs (selfish conservatives, preachy upper-middle-class liberals; obviously an oversimplified false dichotomy) are really just being manipulated by Reagan-style “bootstraps” propaganda that helps ensure that the middle class’s energy is focused on what the poor are doing and not what the rich are doing.
Wait a minute…..you mean to tell me that there are actual homeless people in Austin Texas ? I thought Austin was an oasis or free thinking types like Elon Musk and Joe Rogan could roam around freely in tight t shirts and not have to worry about coastal inconveniences like taxes and the homeless ?
The first thing Musk did after moving to Austin was bitch about housing prices in Austin.
This is Mimsie. Not to be confused with NIMBY…
I dig Oliver overall, but it helps to go into it with the following thoughts:1. The format works better with some topics than with others.2. It’s a half hour, and the “main story” is about 20 minutes, so it’s going to be a cursory walkthrough at best.3. We live in a country in which (for one example) R. Kelly only really faced justice as a result of public outcry on the back of a prime time docuseries. Anything that can help nudge the conversational needle is a plus, IMO.
Theres a lot of ways to describe Dr Drew, but “once beloved” is not one of them. The guy is a psychiatrist who has — for decades — been profiting off of broadcasting the lowest, most embarassing moments of his TV patients’ lives. He convinced them to waive their privacy for a small amount of money, knowing this public humiliation was the absolute worst option for their mental health, and would drastically increase their suicide risk. And surprise, a huge number of his Rehab patients killed themselves.And that’s without getting into the antivax pseudoscientific Fox News racket he’s setup.At best Dr Drew was “kind of liked” 30 years ago while he was on Loveline. But he’s been one of the industry’s biggest monsters for a real long time now.
The bit highlighting this like it’s a white person problem is one reason that the situation doesn’t improve: media has successfully created an imagine in our head of what a NIMBY is, that is very good at enabling other NIMBYs to believe they aren’t one. Case in point, NYC, where you can go to a heavily-black neighborhood and find people rallying to save… a “historic” two-car garage from being replaced with housing (thus exacerbating the housing supply issue and basically making their own problems with unaffordable rents pushing people out of the neighborhood incrementally worse.) Wealthy (and disproportionately white) NIMBYs are just more likely to have the means to successfully fight these sorts of things, but there are very, very few people who buy property and then say “absolutely!” to having it rezoned or adding homeless shelters right next to them.
In short: John Oliver makes a living explaining things to people who likely just end the program feeling outraged or superior, without considering they’re probably actually part of the problem too.
It’s a bit of self-flagellation, a means to excuse these peoples’ behaviour:“Yeah, I live in an apartment block that was built by bulldozing the only greenspace for eight miles, but I watch John Oliver!”
And what is your idea of great commentary? Amy Monotone on “Communism Now!”?
That “white people congratulating themselves and feeling superior after watching it” thing is the sense I get from a lot of “Hamilton” goers. They can clap and cheer at the line “Immigrants! We get the job done!” and then do nothing to affect change in the systems that marginalize them after they leave the theater.But they paid to watch a musical that stars Black and brown folks, so isn’t that kinda similar?
The last homeless encampment went swimmingly in Philadelphia. And Camden.
This is my issue with NIMBYs, though: their position essentially boils down to “I recognize that there is a problem, and I’d rather that there weren’t. Thassit.”None of this is targeted toward you, BTW: Don’t want homeless encampments? Provide housing solutions to mitigate that. Don’t want those solutions anywhere in your area? Expect tents to pop up on occasion. Don’t like either solution? Come up with one, or just say that you’d rather the problem go away on its own.
When I have foolishly engaged on Nextdoor, it amazes me that folks seem to be perfectly willing to spend $$$$$ more money to incarcerate the unhoused while being unwilling to fund ‘housing first,’ the cheaper approach that actually works. I gave up after pointing out that their suggestion of “setting up places in the desert and making the homeless go there instead” was concentration camps. There’s a textbook case of otherization going on where the unhoused are portrayed as basically inhuman: they are beyond being helped, they can never be normal, they are only unhoused because they choose to be.
Yep. At that point, people are so fucking lizard brained that they go full “Well, I don’t LIKE it!” Idiots, man.
Poverty is seen as a moral failing.
And that perspective (poverty as a moral failing) is one of the cornerstones of American capitalism.
Never thought I’d see the A.V. Club write a post about how NIMBYs are bad but I am very happy to see it.
I wonder how many times John Oliver has picked up needles or human feces from his front yard? If the answer is zero then I don’t really care about his opinion. If you successfully NIMBY’d your way out of the problem you don’t get to judge everyone else for trying to do the same thing.
All they need to counter the NIMBY impulse is to find and amplify the positive stories of people who welcomed homeless shelters into their neighborhoods and found themselves better off for it.
F..k you man……..
I think my favorite thing about this whole topic is all the people who have never done any research into the topic, only know what little they know because of stories like this (and their own prejudices and biases absorbed from the culture), and yet feel qualified to yell opinions.My wife worked at homeless services agencies for several years and we ourselves provided a safe place for a local homeless man to live on our property for six months last year until he was able to find permanent indoor housing again. All of the policy points Oliver made in this piece were dead-on (it was nice hearing the phrase “permanent supportive housing” from someone besides my wife), and while it’s fun to be judgmental (like, what we really need to focus our energy on is Oliver, not the actual homelessness crisis??), in point of fact this whole thing is a public policy disaster essentially caused by Reagan-style “bootstraps” propaganda as a way to manipulate the middle class by demonizing the poor.Our society is deliberately structured so that there’s a large cohort of people at the bottom trapped in poverty, and instead of addressing the actual underlying cause (concentration of wealth and the use of limited housing stocks as a way to funnel money from the poor to the rich), we pretend that this is just a bunch of deliberately chosen moral failings.
I have mixed feelings about this segment. On the one hand, I agree with almost everything stated here. Housing First is how I got off the street and it has helped so many people I’ve met. On the other hand, while Doctor Drew was wrong to claim that homelessness is just a mental health and addiction crisis, it is in part a mental health and addiction crisis, and we won’t successfully deal with the problem as a whole without dealing with those problems. But I understand that mental health (the reason I became homeless in the first place) and homelessness is such a complicated issue that it could easily take up the entire segment. So I’m glad that they covered as much as they did and hopefully raised a little more awareness.
I had a housemate we had to kick out because she secretly stopped taking her medication and she was doing things that were endangering the rest of the people in the house, not to mention creating a terrible environment for the rest of us by not communicating and slowly disintegrating mentally. Turns out she’d been in shelters and had problems staying on meds before. The rest of the people in the house also had mental health issues, including myself, but we were taking medication and seeing therapists. But we didn’t have the bandwidth to provide a support system for a person who was refusing help and putting us in danger at the same time. So what can be done? That’s a complex part of the issue that doesn’t have an easy answer.
Even if Quack Drew is right (he’s not), then he still needs to acknowledge that we don’t deal with addiction or homelessness anywhere nearly as well as we need to anyway.
I really think John Oliver is getting his flow back now he’s back in the studio. The last couple of episodes have really made me think this particular show format has another 10 seasons in it. The comment about Mitt Romney being on an acid trip because “he wont stop licking boots” had me in stitches.
I know weekly, on this websight, there are posters decrying this format, calling him hypocritical, and generally getting “tired of Oliver’s schtick”. (why watch this show then?) I feel that is a healthy dose of upper-middle class guilt, I know I definitely have some of that.
What I took from this episode was the idea of housing first, and that people might need first to get private shelter before recovering from the various mental and physical illnesses that come from homelessness. Some of the thing’s I’ve heard happening in homeless shelters here in Ireland would chill you.“Housing First” is not a phrase or idea we use allot here in Ireland, I think possibly because of our mostly centerist, conservative leaning government. I’ll continue to vote left, and push for social housing, where I can.