Fox News host Jesse Watters has claimed homeless individuals largely want to be homeless.
"Now I think it’s clear that homeless people, from the people who have spoken, want to be homeless," he said, before playing clips of people living on the streets claiming they don't want to enter shelters.
Without knowing how many people the Fox News crew spoke with, there is no way to know if the network cut clips of people saying they would prefer to be housed from the final broadcast.
Watters has long used his platform on the network to complain about individuals suffering homelessness.
In 2015, he went to Penn Station in New York City to interview individuals for a segment on The O'Reilly Factor.
The point of the piece was ostensibly to argue that homelessness had skyrocketed under New York Mayor Bill de Blasio – a Democrat – and included Watters characterising the homeless as drug-addled and drunks.
He also suggested they posed a danger to the rest of the population.
Later, in 2019, Watters faced criticism after he advocated for Los Angeles to bulldoze homeless encampments and force them into institutions.
"You only have one solution," he said during a segment on The Five. "You bulldoze the 50-block radius and you institutionalise everybody and detoxify them and then you let them out."
The segment was again used as a way to bludgeon Democrats. Watters claimed that California liberals "allowed this" to happen in Los Angeles. He called the scene in Los Angeles one of the most "depraved, disgusting things" he had ever seen.
“We saw drugged-out zombies chasing barefooted babies through piles of garbage with hypodermic needles and fire everywhere,” Watters said at the time.
A report from 2021 that collected data on homelessness in America found that homelessness has been on the rise for four years. That report was issued just before the coronavirus became a national emergency, and does not account for the individuals who became homeless as a result of the pandemic.
Homelessness also affects Black and Latino communities at a disproportionate rate when compared to white people. The problem is especially bad in large cities, where the cost of living is significantly more expensive than in less populated parts of the country. A quarter of all homelessness nationwide occurs in New York and Los Angeles.
The rising cost of living nationwide, paired with stagnant wages and structural racism affecting people of colour are believed the be major driving forces in the worsening homelessness crisis in the US. The opioid epidemic has also exacerbated the problem.
