Welcome, to Last Week Tonight!
I'm John Oliver,
thank you so much for joining us.
It has been a busy week.
The U.S. entered a bear market,
there was historic flooding
in Yellowstone National Park,
and in Peru, a hearing concerning
a corruption inquiry into their president
was disrupted in
a truly spectacular way.
What the public prosecutor's office
is investigating is clearly gentlemen,
there is interference from what
seems to be the law firm,
showing very suggestive images.
I will say, that's a little more
than suggestive images, though.
A suggestive image is the enticing
hint of what lies beneath.
That is straight up d*ck.
That is a whole d*ck on the TV in Peru.
But instead of focusing on all of that,
we're going to concentrate on the U.S.,
where the House committee
investigating January 6th continued
to unearth new details regarding
the days leading up to the insurrection,
including the surprisingly large role of
Tr*mp's legal adviser, John Eastman.
Quick side note, if you are ever
accused of a crime
and your lawyer shows up to court
dressed like this, you are going to jail.
Eastman was the one who devised
the theory that Mike Pence
could single-handedly negate the
election results a theory that was met
with an appropriate level
of skepticism at the time
from this White House lawyer.
I said, hold on a second. I want to
understand what you're saying.
You're saying that you believe
the vice president acting as president
of the Senate can be the sole decision
maker as to, under your theory,
who becomes the next president
of the United States?
And he said: Yes. I said:
Are you out of your effing mind?
Right, although I will say,
at this point, you can just say f*ck.
Democracy is hanging on by a thread,
and you had a front row seat.
You can say f*ck. You said it
then and you should say it now.
Because what he was suggesting
to you there was bonkers.
The idea that a single person could
decide the presidency
is completely against
the ideals of this country,
which is why the Constitution starts
with the people and not Mike.
Also and I know it's not
the important thing here,
but what is happening
behind that man?
Why does this bat have justice
written on it?
And what are these three metal wig
things right below it?
Do you wear them?
Or did you see one
of those guys painted silver
who moves when you give him money,
and scalp him?
Also, that panda painting was apparently
and this is true featured
in the Fifty Shades of GrayYmovie.
It is all very weird!
I would say it's the most distracting
visuals during
a televised government hearing,
but as we all know,
Peru has significantly
raised the bar in that regard.
Obviously, the point of these hearings
is to learn lessons from the efforts
to steal the last election,
to prevent it from happening again.
But for many Republicans,
it seems the only mistake they see
is that they didn't go far enough.
Because we are in the midst
of a midterm election year right now,
and already, more than 100 Republican
primary winners back Tr*mp's false
claims of election fraud.
An especially concerning subset
are candidates for secretary of state,
because they could end up
in a position to directly influence
the next presidential election.
Take Jim Marchant who looks like
what a child would produce if you simply
told them to draw business.
On Tuesday, Marchant became the
Republican nominee
for secretary of state in Nevada.
Which is alarming, given that he's
a conspiracy theorist
who's said things like this.
The shape that our country is in right
now is because of election fraud.
The people of Nevada have
not elected anybody since 2006,
they've been installed by
the deep state cabal.
The people of Nevada haven't
legitimately elected anybody since 2006.
That is a pretty bold claim,
especially coming from a guy
who himself was elected to the state
assembly there in 2016.
Also, when Marchant was asked
to specify who, exactly,
he thought was stealing elections,
he said, I don't know actually.
I think it's a global thing.
The people in power want
to maintain their power.
Which is honestly pretty refreshing
coming from a conspiracy theorist.
We all know there's a secret
cabal pulling the strings of politicians
around the world, but I'm certainly
not going to wildly speculate about it.
That would be irresponsible.
But crucially, Marchant isn't alone
he's actually leading
a group of candidates
called the America First Secretary
of State Coalition,
which also includes New Mexico's
Audrey Trujillo, who's referred
to the 2020 election as coup,
which makes her explanation of
why she decided to run
for office a bit worrisome.
I decided to run for secretary of
state when I saw the in the very
inconsistencies
in this last election.
I feel that a lot of people,
whether we can prove it or not,
feel that this election was stolen.
Whether we can prove it or not?
But that's a pretty big loophole,
isn't it, Audrey?
We all believe plenty of things
that we can't prove,
but we shouldn't base major life
decisions on them.
For instance, I can't prove that,
in his day, beloved children's author
of The Giving Tree Shel
Silverstein was f*cking nonstop.
I believe it, though. I mean,
look at him. Now you believe it, too.
Look at America's first fuckboy.
He knows exactly
where the sidewalk ends.
But again, we can't prove that,
can we?
So, we just keep that belief in
our hearts and try not to use it
as motivation to completely
dismantle dis democracy.
It's the least that we can do.
And then there is Kristina Karamo,
who is running for secretary
of state in Michigan,
and who is really something.
Kristina Karamo has not been shy in
insisting there was widespread cheating
in the 2020 vote,
touting debunked claims,
and saying Donald Tr*mp
was the true winner in Michigan.
Her most inflammatory language
is aimed at Democrats.
Their party has totally been taken
over by a satanic agenda.
Including Michigan's
current secretary of state.
She's an evil woman.
She's a very evil woman.
Democrats don't have
a satanic agenda, mainly because
that would require having
an agenda in the first place.
For the record, Michigan's current
secretary of state,
Jocelyn Benson, is not evil…
In fact, just go to her Wikipedia page,
and look for the section entitled
Horrible Acts of Evil.
It is just not there.
Although you will find that she has
completed 23 full marathons since 2005.
But that's not evil, is it?
It's just annoying.
No judgment, but the only reason
to run that many marathons is because
you like bragging to your friends,
or you're horny for stopping traffic.
Those are the only two options.
Extreme views on election fraud
are par for the course for this coalition.
The thing with Karamo is that
she has a lot of other views, too.
She suggested in a podcast that
premarital sex paves the way
for society condoning pedophilia.
When we normalize people fornicating
and we normalize people living together
with their boyfriends
and girlfriends, all this stuff,
we open a door to us to get to
the point where we have people
who want to normalize pedophilia.
She also referred to herself
as an anti-vaxxer
before the Covid-19
vaccines were authorized.
Guess what.
I'm crazy. I'm an anti-vaxxer.
Come on.
You don't sound crazy.
Whispered Voice on the Phone.
And while there is a lot to
object to there
we normalize people fornicating
and living together
as boyfriend and girlfriend,
is like, 10 fake moral panics ago.
I'm not saying that she's not wrong,
it's just she's wrong in such
an outdated way.
It's like finding out someone
is mad at Bill Clinton for trying weed.
You're upset about that? Today?
I mean, you're wrong for being mad
about that, but even worse,
you're late.
And look, these are just three
of the worrying candidates
for secretary of state around
the country there are many others.
Which should frankly
give everyone pause.
Because the January 6th committee
is reminding everyone
just how close we came
to democracy basically collapsing.
It was a handful of people
in the right position choosing
to do the right thing that saved us
from a constitutional crisis.
But there are multiple candidates running
for consequential positions right now
on the platform of basically. Let's do
the coup again but better next time.
And if you are not
worried about that,
if I may quote a man with the world's
most chaotic Zoom backdrop,
you're out of your f*cking
mind. And now, this.
And Now: In Honor of Father's Day,
Zaddies.
- You didn't know what a zaddy is.
- I don't.
- What is a zaddy?
- A zaddy is a very hot, sexy older man.
- What's the Z stand for?
- It's like Daddy, but with a Z.
Defined as an attractive man
who is also stylish, charming,
and self- confident.
- Are you a zaddy?
- I don't think so.
Happy Zaddy's Day over
there to you two.
- Are you saying. We're zaddies?
- We qualify as zaddies?
Let's talk about Jeff
Bezos to wrap this up.
He has accomplished a lot in his life,
and now he's adding another
title to his extensive list of
achievements a zaddy.
The zaddy himself, Dr. Anthony
Fauci.
- Is Putin a zaddy?
- 100% not.
- Who's more zaddy?
- You're both equally zaddy.
- I'm not a zaddy.
- No. Sorry, Derek. Yeah.
I would say my husband's a
zaddy.
You watching, boo?
Are you watching?
That's what you said about Gary down
the hallway, too, but whatever.
Moving on. Our main story tonight
concerns housing.
The thing that 16-year-old TikTok
millionaires can afford,
and you can't.
Housing is something TV audiences
can't seem to get enough of,
whether it's watching angry
couples hunt for the perfect place
to get divorced in, or
watching celebrities
giving Architectural Digest tours of
their homes, as they discover things
that were clearly put
there by stylists,
and occasionally call it out in a
gloriously passive-aggressive way.
I love cooking. I cook a lot
and I bake a lot. I love limes,
I love them, they're great,
I love them so much
and I like to present them
like this in my house.
She is so magnificently weird.
Now, real Dakota-heads will know that
she later claimed she is,
in fact, actually allergic to limes,
saying, It was hard to ignore
them, so I just lied.
But she may well have just been
lying about that as well.
She's pure chaos, I love her,
she should be the president.
But this story
isn't going to be about people
who own their
own lime-infested homes.
It's going to be about the more than a
third of American households who rent.
And if you do rent, you'll
undoubtedly be aware
of what's been happening recently.
Tonight, skyrocketing rents,
forcing a growing number of Americans
to think twice about where home is.
Rent prices across the country
skyrocketing.
- Rents are rising nationwide.
- Rents are going way, way up.
Yeah, rent is skyrocketing.
And that is the last thing that you want
to hear is on the rise, along
with Covid cases, m*rder rates,
and Henry Kissinger's life
expectancy.
The bitch just won't quit, will he?
The median monthly asking rent in the
U.S. surpassed $2,000
for the first time last month
that is up 15% since the same time
last year,
well above the rate of inflation.
And it's up over 30% in cities like
Cincinnati, Seattle,
and Nashville and
nearly 50% in Austin.
You, or someone you know, may well
be struggling to find a place right now,
or are being priced out of where you
currently live by your landlord.
But the fact is, rent affordability
isn't a remotely new problem.
If you live in New York, your city became
unaffordable to rent in in 2004.
See this line? That line is
Generally, for rent, it's advised you
don't spend past that line.
But if you live in Miami, you
probably passed that line in 2001.
And in Chicago in 2012.
Los Angeles has been plain unaffordable
since before 1979.
Rent is growing faster than the money
most people make to pay it.
It's true. Rent is growing
faster than wages.
It's a problem we've known about for
decades and is only getting worse.
Which was, I believe,
a working title for this show.
It was either that,
or America's Saddest Home
Videos with Adult McLovin.
In fact you're laughing too hard at that.
In fact, right now there is not
a single county in the U.S. where
a worker earning minimum wage
can afford a modest two-bedroom
rental home.
And look, there are undoubtedly
individual landlords out there
who behave decently to their
tenants.
But many others will conveniently
blame the market rate
for extortionate rent hikes,
and imply that the
decision simply isn't theirs to make.
Just watch financial guru Dave Ramsey
try and reassure one landlord
who said he felt guilty about raising
his rents above
what his tenants could afford.
If I raise my rent to be market rate,
that does not make me a bad Christian.
I did not displace the
person out of the house
if they can no longer afford it,
the marketplace did.
The economy did. The ratio of the
income that they earned
to their housing expense
displaced them.
I didn't cause any of that.
Kicking someone out of your
house doesn't make you a bad Christian.
It's in the Beatitudes,
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
f*cked are the poor in money, for
theirs is the Kingdom of Landlords.
Wazzaaaa!
So, given that rents are going up,
and some landlords seem to think
that that's completely unavoidable,
we thought tonight,
we'd look at rental housing
why it's increasingly
expensive, how steeply the system
is stacked against renters,
and what we can do to combat that.
And let's start with understanding
our current housing supply.
You'll often hear that high rents
are a supply
and demand issue basically,
too many renters, not enough units.
And that is partially true.
Because there are currently not nearly
enough affordable units in the U.S.
Which is a little weird
to think about, isn't it?
Because if you live in any city,
you probably see new
buildings cropping up all the time,
called things like 4 East
or Summit 3 Eleven, with taglines like,
Luxury urban dwellings driven by
design.
There's almost certainly a
coffee shop without
a bathroom on the ground floor.
So, apartments are being
built. But the problem is,
thanks in part to local NIMBY
opposition to more affordable,
multi-family housing,
it's mainly been at the high end.
In fact, in the last three decades,
the national stock of rental
units available actually grew
by more than 13 million.
But, crucially, the number of units
at the lowest end of the market fell
by nearly 4 million.
That might be why if you've ever
tried to search for affordable apartments
in your area,
Google just says, nope.
And this serious lack of new affordable
housing has enabled landlords
to charge higher rents for
the units that exist.
Something that has increasingly
attracted institutional investors
these are corporate
landlords, like private equity firms,
or even publicly traded
companies, that pool the rents
of their tenants and sell them
as investments.
They have long been players in
apartment rentals, but more recently,
after the 2008 housing crash,
companies like these popped up,
to snap up single-family homes,
and rent them out.
And because institutional
investors are always trying
to maximize returns, they'll take
any opportunity to push rents higher.
Take Monarch,
which has been called middle
America's fastest-growing landlord.
Here is their owner, last year,
salivating at the prospect of rent hikes.
We have an unprecedented opportunity,
at least in my working lifetime,
to really press rents, press
rents on renewals
because the country is highly occupied
we're 97 and a half percent.
And so,
where are people going to go?
They can't go anywhere.
They want to be in apartments,
or they have to be in apartments,
and we have a tremendous opportunity
to press both on renewing leases
for existing residents,
and to reset market rates, which
we've reset numerous times
even this year.
They can't go anywhere, and for us,
that's an unprecedented opportunity
to press them.
That is a terrible way
to talk about people.
Honestly, it's barely an
acceptable way to talk about paninis.
Those sandwiches
can't go anywhere, f*ck it, press 'em.
Squeeze those f*ckers.
I wanna see lines!
So, if you are wondering why your rent
is going up, it may well be
because your landlord sees the
current affordable housing crisis
as a chance to reset
market rates.
And in a lot of the country,
there are very few legal constraints
to stop them doing that.
You may have heard of rent control,
which strictly limits how much
a landlord can charge you,
but vanishingly few people have
access to that anymore.
More commonly, there's rent
stabilization.
Which, in theory, means
that on certain older properties,
landlords can only raise the rent
by a certain percentage per year.
But only two states and D.C.
require it,
and more than 30 states
have actually passed laws banning it.
And even when protections exist,
landlords can find ways around them.
For instance, they might
try and force rent-stabilized tenants out
by allowing a property to fall into
disrepair, or by harassing them
with incessant construction
until they voluntarily leave.
Take the rent-stabilized tenants
who lived in this building in New York.
Their landlord
claimed that he was simply upgrading it
to improve tenants'
quality of life.
But that is not how it felt to them.
Tenants say they were offered buyouts
to leave, but some,
like George Manatos and Gretchen
Mongrain, who've lived here
for almost 10 years, opted to stay.
A decision they say came
with a warning.
If you don't take the buyout,
we are going to renovate this,
and you are going to have to live
through the nightmare of renovation.
Mongrain says the unit next to her was
demolished with a crowbar.
When she asked about the noise
and debris left behind.
All the person said was, I just want
to let you know there's going
to be a lot of rats from now on.
It says a lot that they would
endure a rat-littered construction site
just to hold onto a
rent-stabilized unit.
Because that is not exactly
a welcoming message.
If you went to someone's
home and their welcome mat said,
"There's going to be a lot of
rats from now on,
you would drop your casserole dish then
and there and turn the f*ck around.
Thereby instantly falling right into the
rats' trap. And it is worth noting,
when rent-stabilized
tenants did leave that building,
the asking rents, unsurprisingly,
then as much as doubled.
And I assume that those apartments
were then snapped up
by a nice young rat
couple with rich tastes
and disposable income.
I believe we have a photo?
Yeah, there it is. Yeah.
They seem nice.
And with rents being squeezed across
the board, and protections few
and far between, lower-income
renters are, obviously,
the most vulnerable here.
Even before the pandemic struck,
in households
that paid more than half their
income on rent and utilities.
Which is just not
sustainable for anyone.
Now, in theory,
we have something designed
to combat that federal housing
assistance in the form of housing
choice vouchers,
commonly known
as Section 8.
The idea behind them is that a
household still has to pay 30%
of its monthly
income for rent and utilities,
but the government will then
help cover the rest.
The problem is, this program is
massively underfunded,
to the point that only one in four
households that qualify
for assistance actually receive it. As
we've shown on this show before,
sometimes, people have literally raced
to apply for vouchers
when they became available.
And even once you have applied,
the waiting period can be absurd.
Take Chicago Alderwoman Jeanette
Taylor, whose application took
a ridiculously long time to
be approved.
- When did you apply for this voucher?
- In 1993.
- And when did you get it?
- 2022.
So, 29 years.
What was your reaction
when you got that letter?
I just sat on the side of the bed
for like an hour in shock.
And I was like, God, you got a
sick sense of humor.
I mean, she's right. He does.
Although to be honest, I kind of prefer
God's earlier stuff.
Convincing Abraham to almost k*ll his
son as a prank?
Very funny. Flooding the world and
making one guy get every animal
species to f*ck on a boat?
Hilarious! But a housing voucher
that's 29 years late?
That does start to feel like God
might be running out of ideas.
And the thing is, even if you are lucky
enough to get a voucher,
you still then have to find
a landlord willing to accept it.
But many landlords don't,
either because they see it
as a bureaucratic hassle,
or because they have a stigma
against Section 8 recipients, which
leads to a lot of stories like these.
I was blessed with a homing choice
voucher in April,
and I haven't been able to find a spot.
I called over 200 places that would
supposedly take the voucher,
and none of those places were
actually renting.
How many places do you think you got
turned down from?
Jesus, at least 15.
If not more. It's like I have a plague.
It's like we have a plague.
Everywhere you turn, no Section 8.
I've called up 50 apartment complexes
in Sacramento. They don't look
at me as an individual.
I'm on Section 8, therefore
I'm poor. Therefore, I'm bad.
That is terrible. Because even the worst
people will honor vouchers.
Take Willy Wonka. Sure, he
may have run a sweatshop
with horrible safety protocols
that put children's lives in danger,
but even he had the decency
to honor the f*cking vouchers.
Now, discrimination
against those with Section 8 vouchers
is illegal in some
places.
But even where that is the case,
landlords can just invent other reasons
to turn people away.
And with housing this tight,
rents skyrocketing, and
landlords holding this much power,
low-income renters can be left
vulnerable
to the nightmare scenario:
eviction.
We've talked about evictions
on this show before.
They're invasive, traumatizing,
and like all the other perils of renting,
disproportionately
affect Black people.
One study of more than 1,000 counties
found Black renters made up
around 20% of all adult renters,
but nearly a third of all eviction
filing defendants.
And perhaps nowhere demonstrates
the enormous power imbalance
between landlords and tenants more
than housing court.
Starting with the fact that,
in most places,
tenants don't have a right
to a lawyer in eviction proceedings.
And if you don't have an attorney
to guide you through
what can be a complex process,
not only can you fail
to raise legitimate defenses,
you can make basic mistakes
with huge consequences.
Gina comes across a tenant sitting
distraught.
So, she came to court dutifully,
came to court early,
and as happens sometimes because
court is confusing,
she sat in the wrong courtroom.
While her case was heard
in a different courtroom.
When she realized her mistake,
she dashed over
and caught the landlord outside,
but he doesn't want to speak with her.
And the court informed her
that after 10 days,
the sheriff would come in
and remove her and her three children
from her home.
One tiny mistake and
her housing was gone.
Which is clearly unfair.
The only time someone should be
punished for going into the wrong room
is when they accidentally
stumble into the 3:30
showing of Downton A New Era.
Cause get ready for a long, boring ride.
"Oh, but John, it's delightful
because they're British!" It is not.
One study of nearly 100,000 eviction
cases in Denver
found that nearly 90% of landlords were
represented by a lawyer,
compared to less than 1% of
tenants.
Which is not good.
And yet, some attorneys who
work for landlords get very angry
at the suggestion that
tenants are poorly protected.
Take this guy, who represents
multiple landlords in St. Louis.
He is self-styled guru for
the real estate bar.
And just listen to him giving a Zoom
seminar about evictions
and rolling his eyes at some of the
basic legal protections extended
to renters during Covid.
The advocates for the tenants are like,
these people still don't know
what's available to them
and they don't know anything
about the CDC declaration.
Them! Them all! They're
too stupid to know
what their legal rights are?
They shouldn't have signed
a contract for $1,000 a month unit
for a year if they're too stupid to
sign, to know anything,
to read the news, to have
any idea about their rights.
If they're too stupid, they shouldn't
be signing the $12,000 contract.
Okay, first, that is definitely
the angriest I've ever seen anyone
wearing a Rush hat.
And second, there is just no doubt
in my mind that that man,
at some point in his life, has been
kicked out of a youth soccer game.
He just exudes "Ref, I'd like a word!"
energy. I guarantee,
that is a man who has thrown
a lawn chair,
or at the very least squeezed
a Kool-Aid Jammer so tight
in his fists the other parents thought
his hand was coveredin blood.
Besides that, I will say,
he seems like a cool guy.
That is what tenants
can be up against.
And the problem is, eviction
filings can be on your record for years,
jeopardizing your chance at future
housing.
Just watch as this woman contacts
a realtor
about a home that she is
interested in.
Did you get a chance
to drive by and take a look at it?
Yeah. I'm sitting in front of the
home right now as we speak.
Okay. And what's your name?
- Margaret.
- Okay, Margaret.
And how soon are you looking to move
into a house?
As soon as possible. Right now.
Are you on a lease where
you're living at right now?
No, as a matter of fact, we're not.
We're actually homeless.
Okay, and so where are
you currently living?
In our vehicle.
Unfortunately, when we check the
court records and see an eviction,
unfortunately,
we can't help you.
There are some things that should
probably stay on your record.
Like w*r crimes,
or voting for Taylor Hicks
in the 2006 season
of American Idol.
You shouldn't get to come back
from that so easily.
But people should have a chance
to find safe and affordable housing,
since the alternative
is being homeless!
And the thing is,
you can be turned down
for housing simply because an eviction
case was filed against you,
even if that case was later dropped,
or, indeed, you won it.
The long-term
damage that eviction filings
do to your records is why many
will choose not to fight
when a landlord tries
to kick them out.
That is one of the reasons that
people can wind up
with a so-called "informal" eviction.
That's where their landlord
does things like change the locks,
thr*aten them, or even
remove the front door.
It is hard to measure just how many of
these take place each year,
but a survey of Milwaukee renters
found that for every eviction ex*cuted
through the judicial system,
there are two others ex*cuted
outside the court,
without any form of due process.
And given just how
devastating evictions can be,
it is infuriating to hear how
some involved in the process view it.
Remember that screaming
Rush fan from earlier?
Well, it turns out, he
actually has a little more to say.
It's sad to say, and some of you who
are not landlords might be shocked
to hear, we evict grandparents
who are poor.
We evict cancer-stricken
people who are attending chemo.
It's sad, but what's sadder
is that somebody who purchases
property for hundreds of thousands
of dollars is given the finger by the law.
Except it's not sadder.
It's just not.
On the great big list of sad things,
person getting evicted during chemo
is right up there with dog
deathsY and the first 10 minutes
of Up.' While "landlord
doesn't get rent"
is at the very bottom
with "celebrity Tweets about
a shitty airline experience,"
and "white guy not allowed
to rap all the lyrics."
It's objectively not that sad at all.
That is the core issue
with rental housing
in this country, though,
people who think that investments
deserve more respect
than basic human needs.
And it has set up a system designed
to ensure that some people
just spiral downwards.
They can't move somewhere cheaper
if nowhere cheaper exists.
They can't apply for federal assistance
if there's nowhere near enough.
They can't even use that assistance
if no one accepts it.
And they can't take their
landlord to court if the court system
is skewed against them.
And they can't depend
on rental housing ever again
if they're evicted even just once.
It's a complete sh*t show.
What can we do about it?
There are some small
things that we could pass.
We could pass rent-stabilization laws
and laws that prohibit discrimination
against recipients of housing
choice vouchers,
and make it easier for landlords
to accept them.
We could also pass laws mandating
the sealing of most eviction records,
and give people a right
to counsel in housing court.
That alone can have massive impacts.
In 2017, after sustained pressure,
New York City became the
first place in the country
to give tenants the right to a
lawyer in housing court.
It is a major reason why, even
before the pandemic moratoriums,
residential evictions were down 40%.
And luckily, other places are now
following that lead.
But I would argue
what we really need to do is
fundamentally change our mindset away
from simply hoping that we can tinker
around the edges of housing policy,
and the private market will sort
the rest of this sh*t out.
Because we've tried that for
decades and yet, here we are.
Instead, we need to agree:
housing is a human right.
And that is not actually
just some empty slogan like
Subway's "Eat Fresh," or Gatorade's
"Is it in you?" which,
looking back, was very, very weird.
This could actually be
policy. Many countries,
including France, Scotland,
and South Africa have legally codified
a right to housing.
And here in the U.S., three-quarters
of Americans already
believe that it is a human right.
As for what that would mean,
it would entail a massive federal
investment in rental assistance,
and the creation of much more
affordable housing units across
the board.
And before anyone suggests
that we can't afford that,
we already subsidize certain
people's homes.
The mortgage interest deduction gives
massive subsidies to homeowners,
by letting them deduct the
interest that they pay
on their mortgage on their taxes.
That has cost the federal government
more than $580 billion
over the last decade.
And currently, nearly two-thirds
of the deduction's benefits
are going to those making
I am benefiting from this program,
and I do not need to be.
We are clearly willing to prioritize
housing in the budget,
just not for the people
who need it the most.
The point here is,
for a large portion of the population,
simply having a place to live
is an everyday battle.
And for far too long,
we have prioritized the protection
of investments over individuals,
and we've set up a system
where landlords can press rents
and reset market rates,
and justify their actions
with self-serving Bible readings,
even as they subject tenants
to everything from tactical rat assaults
to the incoherent rage of the single
most foul-mouthed fan Ontario's
premiere prog rock power
trio has ever f*cking known.
And now, this.
And Now:
It's Always Happy Hour on QVC.
I just think you looked so great in it,
Amy, and it's like, casual, but there's
like an updated elegance to it.
And of course,
I had to stop by with wine,
cause I missed you guys last week.
- We love you.
- We love you, Jane Treacy.
Thanks for swinging by, and I'll swing by
and bring you some more wine later on.
It's just me, a few bottles of wine.
I'm a mom, and I enjoy a nice,
glass of wine sometimes.
Roxanne literally took a sip of
the wine.
I want that for the record.
Like, that's not a prop.
- We're going to bring in Jacqui Stafford.
- She has wine!
And they said, Wine? And I said,
Yeah. I need a hand.
I need several hands.
I need a glass of wine.
I don't know if you two have heard,
but we're having a tea party tonight,
but we have wine in our teacups.
We have wine in our teacups.
We're having a tea party.
Is it a tea is it a teacup,
or can it be a little bit bigger?
- There you go!
- Yeah!
- All right. I love you.
- Love you.
And we are going to go
shopping for wine.
Did you not hear Pat say
we have to stay away from the wine?
Let me just bring my own bottle of wine,
and I will be here.
I happen to be right near my glass of
wine.
It's always a pleasure
to have you here.
I think I lost my wine.
Do you have your wine?
I've lost my wine
for the 100th time tonight.
I have my college T-shirts.
I have my Dave
Matthews T-shirts that I love…
- Crash!
- Listen, get me started.
- Into me.
- Okay. I'm number 41 all the way.
What's happening?
We almost had Dave Matthews wine
here at QVC years ago.
I think we should all go
- to his Instagram.
- My gosh.
That's our show,
thanks so much for watching!
These are my limes.
I love them,
and I love to present them
like this on my desk.
See you next week!
Good night!
Subtitle made for…
09x15 - Rental housing in the United States
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American late-night talk and news satire television program hosted by comedian John Oliver.
American late-night talk and news satire television program hosted by comedian John Oliver.