Going Home – What would it take to make housing a human right?

Going Home

Fight! Fight! Fight! Housing is a human right!

Is it?

What does it mean that we chant these words at nearly every single housing demonstration in New York City, where each night—as of summer 2025, when I am writing these words—over one hundred thousand people sleep in homeless shelters, and in a country where over three-quarters of a million people are homeless?

Is the human right to housing backed by local, state, national, or international law? If so, how is it being so flagrantly flouted? If a right is something you are actionably entitled to do or have, does the right to housing still exist absent the ability to wield it? Can rights endure without state power (or some other source of collective control) to enact and enforce them?

Is housing a natural right? Is it a right granted by the divine? If housing—like everything else we need to live in this world, including health care, food, water, air, and so on—is a human right, whose responsibility is it to provide and protect it, and therefore who, exactly, is letting us down? Does couching the right to housing as a human right relegate it to the realm of the abstract and aspirational, rather than the real and present? Does it add validity to our claim, or does it remind us of all the other supposedly universal human rights our sovereigns regularly deny to portions of their populations?

Can we summon a right through incantation? Does repeating this mantra build meaning and strength over time, or does it devolve into a ritualized performance? Can we conjure this right into existence through the moral force of our convictions? Does a right exist because it should?

These questions rush through my mind every time I hear those words chanted—which is to say many times a month, sometimes more than once daily, depending on the cadence of our campaigns. Perhaps the word that challenges me the most in this chant is the simplest of them all: is. When we shout that housing is a human right—not just that housing should be a human right, or that we’re fighting to make housing a human right—we are saying that this right exists now, and the extreme housing inequities we face are therefore a severe violation of our human rights.

There are legal statutes of various kinds that justify this claim. Certainly under United Nations international law, housing is included in the core bundle of human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, declares in Article 12 that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his [sic] privacy, family, home or correspondence” and that “everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” In Article 25, the declaration establishes that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.” Furthermore, the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights establishes that signatories “recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself [sic] and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.”

This is at once an incredibly idealistic and yet deeply limited framework. Its power lies in its radical universality: These rights are assigned to everyone, across time and space, stretching even into the future in the 1966 covenant’s commitment to “continuous improvement.” It is meant to establish a baseline standard of living that all nations must strive toward, leaving no one behind.

But the Universal Declaration’s approach to the right to housing is a negative right against arbitrary eviction and a positive right to a wage high enough to pay for housing; it is not a commandment to its signatories that they enact binding enforcement mechanisms, nor does it compel them to build the housing that human rights law establishes we all must be able to afford and remain within. The covenant takes a step closer to mandating state action by asserting that “States Parties will take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right,” but this leaves a great deal to interpretation, and even to willful failure. The United States became a signatory to the covenant in 1977 (though the Senate has since refused to ratify it). Since 1980, U.S. homelessness has grown by about 500 percent, while the overall population has increased by just over 50 percent, and public housing production has cratered amid programs for demolition and privatization.

The U.S. constitutional order is largely premised on negative rights—in other words, protections from the government (often specifically private property rights), as opposed to positive rights to material goods. But while U.S. policy has largely been hostile to housing as a human right, there have been points at which we came closer to establishing and safeguarding it. As W. E. B. DuBois chronicled in Black Reconstruction in America, radical reconstructionists often included land and housing redistribution as a core part of their revolutionary program. In his famous “Second Bill of Rights” address in 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared “the right of every family to a decent home” had become self-evident, regardless of “station, race, or creed.”

Five years later, and seven months after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, the United States signed into law the Housing Act of 1949. Section 2 of the law establishes a National Housing Goal:

The Congress hereby declares that the general welfare and security of the Nation and the health and living standards of its people require housing production and related community development sufficient to remedy the serious housing shortage, the elimination of substandard and other inadequate housing through the clearance of slums and blighted areas, and the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family, thus contributing to the development and redevelopment of communities and to the advancement of the growth, wealth, and security of the Nation.

This being America, the next sentence of the statute completely undermines the first and points us in extremely limited directions guided primarily by the profit-seeking private housing industry: “The Congress further declares that such production is necessary to enable the housing industry to make its full contribution toward an economy of maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” The law then lists the policy’s objectives, in an ordering that reflected and enshrined the political economy of housing in the United States: “(1) private enterprise shall be encouraged to serve as large a part of the total need as it can; (2) government assistance shall be utilized where feasible to enable private enterprise to serve more of the total need.” Only after private enterprise and government action in service of real estate do we arrive at any stipulation for local authorities to build public housing, with the aid of the national government in clearing “slums and blighted areas.”

This was not the only vision for housing rights in the United States, though—it is just the vision that won. The 1949 Housing Act codified the result of fights over two competing versions of housing policy from the previous decade. On the left flank was the Labor Housing Conference, a group of social democratic unions and urbanists, which called on the state to support labor and other social movement organizations in building housing for the broad working class (from the destitute to the upwardly mobile) on vacant land in and around cities and towns.

On the right flank was the National Public Housing Conference, made up of a strange amalgam of groups like the National Association of Real Estate Brokers and nonprofit reformers, which called on the state to demolish substandard housing and replace it with public housing exclusively for the poor. The Labor Housing Conference pitched their model as a threat to the reign of private developers over the housing system; the National Public Housing Conference framed their preferred policy as complementary to the private sector, which, they argued, was uninterested in or unable to build for the immiserated urban poor.

While the early New Deal experimented with a program much closer to the Labor Housing Conference model, developing some of the finest public housing in the country under the auspices of the Public Works Administration, Congress ultimately adopted the National Public Housing Conference’s bulldoze-first approach, setting off an era of mass urban demolition and subsidized suburban sprawl under the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA—a group whose mission the Labor Housing Conference mocked as “Fuck Housing Altogether.”

As a result, the country’s de facto housing policy became miserly public housing and expansive private development subsidy—less a dual market than a dialectic; in Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s words, “a single United States housing market that was defined by its racially discriminatory, tiered access—each tier reinforcing and legitimizing the other.” But this was not the end of the struggle. A right to housing was a core element of the civil rights movements, although the demands for civil and political rights are generally emphasized in the historical memory over demands for material redistribution and public sector expansion. Figures like Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, and Coretta Scott King collaborated with union leaders and progressive economists to craft the Freedom Budget for All Americans, which in 1966 called for not only full employment and the total eradication of poverty, but also a universal right to housing. Point four of its seven-point plan set out to “wipe out slum ghettos and provide decent homes for all Americans” (emphasis in the original).

This is an interesting formulation, worth dwelling on for a moment. The Freedom Budget embraced elements of the two political poles of the 1930s public housing movement: the right-leaning National Public Housing Conference’s commitment to “slum clearance” and the left-leaning Labor Housing Conference’s commitment to open access. It did not romanticize “slum ghettos” but rather called for their replacement by generous social housing for all.

The document’s primary author, Bayard Rustin, lived in exactly this kind of housing from 1962 to 1987, much of that time with his partner Walter Naegle. Penn South, the social housing development Rustin and later Naegle called home, is cherished today as one of the outstanding achievements of the twentieth-century labor movement in New York: a campus built by the garment workers union’s housing fund that spans twenty acres of central Manhattan. Its fifteen buildings average twenty-one stories and contain 2,820 apartments. Rustin was the first resident of his apartment in building 7B, and he likely considered it an inspiration for the national program he pursued.

While the Freedom Budget was never adopted, the fight for a right to housing in America has continued. Recently, tenant and homeless organizations have fought for a “Homes Guarantee,” a platform that includes rent controls, eviction protections, and the construction of mass social housing on a scale unseen in this country for fifty years. It found a champion in Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns and has continued at the local level in cities and states thereafter.

Although a right to housing feels fairly distant in New York City today, it is absolutely possible to conceptualize how it could work and what it might take to enforce it. According to sociologist Mary Pattillo, eighty-four countries include some degree of housing rights in their governing constitutions, with nations like post-apartheid South Africa perhaps going the furthest to enshrine—if not necessarily to deliver—a human right to housing. American legal scholar Fran Quigley argues that the negative rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution are unachievable without positive human rights and are therefore inter-dependent with the right to housing.

Pie in the sky? Perhaps. That phrase, though, comes from an old Wobblies song by Joe Hill, which warns its listeners not to fall for promises of dessert in the afterlife from those who starve you in the present. In its original sense, then, the right to housing is only “pie in the sky” if it is promised as something that will be delivered to you in the distant future, premised on your good behavior in the here and now. If, however, it is presented as part of a fight—as the opening words of the housing movement’s chant insist—then it is something else entirely: a visible political horizon for struggles in the immediate present.