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The Homelessness Crisis | Second Thought | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The Homelessness Crisis
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Summary
Core Theme
The homelessness crisis in the US is at a record high, driven by systemic economic failures and policy decisions rather than individual failings, leading to increasingly punitive and ineffective governmental responses.
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billions of dollars to mental health and
the homeless population. A lot of them
don't want to take the programs. A lot
of them don't want to get the help that
is necessary. You can't give them a
choice. Either you take the resources
that we're going to give you and or you
decide that you're going to be locked up
in jail. That's the way it has to be now.
now.
>> Or uh involuntary lethal injection or
something. Just kill them.
>> It's a really bad time to be homeless in
the US. The homelessness crisis. [music]
>> Homelessness in America is at a record high.
high.
>> Record high numbers. Earlier this
[music] year
>> and we're getting rid of the slums, too.
We have slums here. We're getting rid of them.
them.
>> Trump tomorrow is like, we're going to
put all the homeless people in
concentration camps. We be like, let's
give it a shot.
>> Police are stand and they're told, don't
do anything under any search. So there
and you can see they want to get at it.
But now they are allowed to do whatever
the hell they want and they can hit real
hard. Last year, the NAEH estimated
there were over 770,000 [music]
people experiencing homelessness across
the country, up almost 20% [music] from
the year before. And with the two
biggest increases being kids and people
over 55. That's bleak. And it turns
[music] out that is far from the whole story.
story.
Just going by the official numbers,
we're seeing the highest rates [music]
of homelessness since the point in time
count, this federal homeless census
started [music] to be conducted um in
the early 2000s. As bad as the official
numbers are, the reality of homelessness
in this country is [music] exponentially
worse, a conservative estimate of the
true number of people who are unhoused
right now in this country is at [music]
least six times greater than the
official number. So, we're talking about
4 million men, women, and children. [music]
But first, it's ad read time cuz God
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show.
I think at this point we can say there
is a war being waged against homeless
people. Like a real war. You might have
already forgotten about this with
everything else going on, but in August,
Trump sent the National Guard to do
sweeps on homeless camps in DC.
>> The Trump administration's federal
takeover of Washington DC is escalating.
>> The crackdown on crime.
>> Part of President Trump's crime
emergency order includes clearing
homeless encampments. President Trump
says it's about making the city safe and beautiful.
beautiful.
>> This wasn't some comedian set. It wasn't
a talking head on Fox. The sitting
president sent the military after people
going through one of the most difficult
things a person can experience. You and
me, we know that having the military
everywhere all the time like this is
part of the fascist frog boiling. If the
excuse wasn't homeless people, it's
going to be protests or crime or helping
ICE kidnap people discriminately like
we've seen in other cities. It's shaping
up to be a real nice police state we've
got here. But that's not the point. When
Trump set the National Guard on DC's
unhoused, it wasn't out of nowhere. For
years now, he and the rest of the
conservative ecosystem have been
promising that as soon as Trump got back
in the White House, he was going to do
just that. When I'm back in the White
House, we will use every tool, lever,
and authority to get the homeless off
our streets.
>> And last year, the Supreme Court gave
him the biggest assist possible to do
this. The case is called Grant's Pass v.
Johnson. And long story short, it
overturned a previous decision that
basically said that you can't just
attack homeless people. Cities and
states who wanted to tear down homeless
camps first had to have enough shelter
space where those people could go. It
wasn't a perfect state of affairs by any
means. Sweeps always do more harm than
good, even when there are shelter spaces
available. But at the very least, it
meant that if you had literally no other
option than sleeping outside, cops
weren't allowed to kick you out of your
last resort. But last year, the court
said they can. And sure enough, once in
office, Trump signed this, the Ending
Crime and Disorder on America's Streets
Executive Order. This executive order
has a lot of stuff in it that we could
talk about, like the fact that it
insists on this idea that homeless
people are violent, mentally ill drug
addicts sleeping in tents and making
cities dangerous. When the reality for
the vast majority of homeless people is,
of course, not that. A majority of
homeless people don't have mental health
or substance use disorders. And that's
according to the government's own
research. And other studies have time
and time again shown that homeless
people are much more likely to be
victims of violent crime than its
perpetrators. This idea that a lot of us
have that homeless people are dangerous
criminals. Even the idea that
homelessness means sleeping outside is
wrong. Most of the 4 million homeless
people in this country are nothing like
that. They are people who clock into
work in the morning and then when they
get off of their shift, they are not
going to an apartment. They're going to
a tent or they're going to a shelter if
there's any shelter space available or
they're going to these hotels or
sleeping in their cars. The tents that
we see on the street, the encampments,
um people sleeping under freeway
overpasses. Um that's just the most
visible manifestation of a far more
pervasive catastrophe.
This entire what I refer to as this
entire shadow realm of homelessness.
people sleeping in their cars, who are
doubled up in the overcrowded apartments
of others, who are languishing really
trapped in these squalid extended stay
hotels and motel and rooming houses
where they're paying double or even
triple what they would pay for an
apartment down the road. So, there's
this whole world of homelessness we're
not seeing.
>> Trump is trafficking in myths about
homeless people. We're all familiar with
mistakes that anyone could make if their
only experience of homelessness is maybe
seeing someone on the street. They're a
calculated lie. Take a shot cuz this is
another blame Reagan thing. One problem
uh that we've had even in the best of
times and [music] that is the people who
are sleeping on the grates, the homeless
who are homeless, you might say by
choice. homelessness as we currently
[music] know it as this kind of
pervasive seemingly unremarkable feature
of the American city like was not always
with us. It has not always been like
that. There have always been people in
this country, you know, here and there
who who did not have stable shelter for
various reasons. But homelessness as we
currently know it, mass homelessness in
this way, um really erupted during
[music] the 1980s. When Reagan came into
office, it was on a plan to undo the New
Deal and let the rich get away with
murder. And much of that plan was built
around making the line between getting
by and hitting rock bottom as easy to
trip over as possible. [music]
To that end, Reagan gutted the entire
social safety net. Funds that went
towards building public housing
disappeared. Poor people were thrown off
welfare and food stamps. [music]
And predictably, all this made the poor
poorer while landlords and rich people
got [music] tax cuts. Nothing ever
trickled down and homelessness exploded. [music]
[music]
>> And the administration realized that
something had to be done to uh sort of
prevent people from linking this
suffering that they could see all around
them on the street that they wouldn't
[music] link that to these policies.
>> So to fix this problem, Reagan's
administration had a solution. Blame the
poor. How? By only funding research on
homelessness if it blamed alcoholism,
drug abuse, or mental illness. People
who wanted to investigate racism or lack
of housing simply didn't get [music]
grants. So, the public only got the
story we're all familiar with today.
And that worked. Reagan poisoned the
well. In ' 86, the New York Times ran a
poll asking people what they thought the
cause of all this new homelessness was.
And like you'd expect today, people
blamed the homeless for being lazy,
mentally ill, or having a substance
abuse problem. No one cited the fact
that because of Reagan, there was simply
not enough affordable housing and more
people who couldn't afford much of
anything anymore. And that has never
been more true than now. You've almost
certainly heard before that no one in
this country can afford a one-bedroom
apartment on minimum wage. I have an
even worse statistic. Look at this map.
This map shows how many available
affordable homes there are for every 100
low-income households in every state.
There is not one place in the US where
there are 100 affordable homes for 100
low-income households. Not one.
In Nevada, for example, there are only
17 affordable places to rent for every
100 families that need it. I know that
when you see someone on a street corner
or you hear all these stories about
homeless people doing drugs or having
mental health problems, it's tempting to
think that that's why they're homeless.
That's what our politicians say. That's
what we see in the media. YouTubers make
entire careers off this. With maps like
these though, you realize that no matter
what people do, even in a hypothetical
scenario where nobody in America had a
drug problem or a mental health problem
or whatever, in a state like Nevada, 83%
of poor families would still have to be
homeless. There are just not enough
affordable homes, regardless of whether
you do everything right. Disabled
people, working people, seniors to not
even get into those who are dealing with
the immense struggles of mental health
problems or substance abuse are homeless
by the millions. That cannot be an
individual failure when it affects
people going through such different circumstances.
circumstances.
People are not homeless by choice,
at least [music]
not their choice. Business owners are
choosing not to pay people enough for
them to live. Politicians are choosing
not to build and manage social housing
in sufficient quantities. Landlords are
choosing not to set affordable rents.
And private equity is choosing to evict
more people left and right.
>> Homes in the US are the most expensive
they have ever been.
>> It is getting harder and harder to
afford a place to live.
>> The number of property foreclosures is
steadily rising.
>> It's not affordable.
>> That reminds me actually of something
shocking that Brian told us in our
interview. We all know that during the
pandemic, Blackstone and private equity
muscled their way into the housing
market and bought up a massive stock of
rental properties that they neglect and
turn into eviction mills. Brian told us
they also bought up extended stay motel
at the same time. Now, these are the
last resort most people have before they
are fully unhoused. Meaning that not
only are these companies jacking up
rents and evicting people willy-nilly,
they also own the place where you end up
after they kick you out. Shitty motel
that cost more than the place you've
been evicted from and don't have the
same tenant protections as a regular
apartment. And if all this wasn't enough
to convince you of how deeply not a
choice homelessness is, look at my
economy dog. There's cause for concern
looking at the state of the American
economy. It's a very tough picture for
the economy.
>> Entry-level jobs are vanishing at an
alarming rate.
>> How many months in a row has the job
report come out in the negative? You
probably know people who have been laid
off. Maybe you [music] have. There are
no jobs. There are no homes. Every
affordable neighborhood has been
gentrified by private equity and scummy
developers. And [music] instead of
giving people a place to stay, the
president's decided that the best
solution is getting the military involved.
involved.
Here is that executive order again. To
the maximum extent permitted by law, all
the rules on the books already
criminalizing homelessness are going to
be enforced. What does the maximum
extent of the law mean to a [music] guy
who has plenary authority? It means
anything goes. I don't think it's
alarmist to
believe that those who are going to be
forced off of the streets, who have
already been forced out of public view,
um will be jailed, be put in prisons,
[music] be put in this growing
archipelago of detention centers, um and
forced to do work that perhaps, you
know, um undocumented uh people were
doing before they were rounded up and deported.
deported.
Trump tomorrow was like, "We're going to
put all the homeless people in
concentration camps." We be like, "Let's
But the problem would be is then right
after it's a slippery slope, right? You
walk around after all the homeless
people be taken away like this is pretty nice.
Here's the big picture. We are in a tail
spin and more people are going to be
homeless, couch surfing, living in a
car, maybe even being out on the street.
That's going to be the reality for more
and more people in your life. If it
isn't already, maybe you're already
going through it yourself. This
government does not want you to pay
attention to how its war on the working
class is to blame. They want
billionaires to keep riding the AI
bubble, moisturized and unbothered, to
blame foreigners and the homeless
themselves. And don't get me wrong,
they'll say they'll help the homeless
and offer treatment for any drug or
mental health problems as well as
shelter, and then they just won't.
That's already happened. They don't
care. Most importantly, they'll ignore
and shut down the one thing that is
proven to work. Housing first.
Let me end the video here. Homelessness
is a housing problem. It's not a drug
problem. It's not a mental health
problem. Plenty of places in the country
have high rates of drug addiction and
mental illness. Only in the places where
housing is unaffordable is there a
homelessness issue. Housing [music]
first is simple. Give people a home, cap
it at 30% of their income and they are
no longer homeless. That's it. It
doesn't matter if they have other things
to deal with. You can't start putting
your life together if you don't know
where you're staying that night or if
your room doesn't have four walls and a
door. where you don't have the minimum
amount of privacy a human being needs.
Housing first just works. We see this in
study [music] after study. People are
healthier. They're thrown in jail less.
They find a job more easily. And they
stop being homeless more durably than
with [music] any other alternative. But
it makes landlords less money. Sends
fewer people to private prison. It
doesn't give you an excuse to have
stormtroopers on every block. It just
saves [music] lives. When so many people
are just one missed paycheck or one
medical emergency away from finding out
just how bad being homeless can be,
there is no alternative. Either we take
care of each other or we get taken care of.
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