John Oliver on Sunday pointed out that housing is now “the thing a 16-year-old TikTok millionaire can afford and you can’t.” (Watch the video below.)
On “Last Week Tonight” the host took aim at skyrocketing rents and some of the greedy attitudes behind them.
He noted that the average monthly rent was at an all-time high and that there wasn’t a single county in the nation where a minimum wage worker can afford to rent a “modest 2-bedroom home.”
Landlords who blamed “market rate” for raising rents didn’t get a pass from Oliver.
He showed a clip of Dave Ramsey, a personal finance personality, assuring a guilt-ridden landlord that raising rent to the market rate “doesn’t make me a bad Christian.”
“I did not displace the person out of that house if they can no longer afford it. The marketplace did,” Ramsey said on “The Ramsey Show.”
“Of course kicking someone out of your house doesn’t make you a bad Christian,” Oliver said. “It’s in the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Fucked are the poor in money. For theirs is the kingdom of landlords. Wazzaaaaaaa!!’”
Then there was footage of Bob Nicolls of Monarch Investment and Management Group gushing over the “unprecedented opportunity” to “press rents.” “Where are people gonna go? They can’t go anywhere,” he reasoned.
Oliver accused the firm of treating people like paninis. See what he meant: