Homelessness and inadequate housing are reaching crisis proportions including in both emerging and developed economies. The urgency and outrage that should be provoked in response to the abhorrent conditions in which millions of people live seem to be absent. Many politicians, judges, and every day people are accustomed to ignoring, stigmatizing, excluding, and even criminalizing people for their poverty and lack of adequate housing. The question is: how did we get here?
Housing has been treated more as a policy aspiration than as a fundamental right. At least part of the answer lies in the history of human rights law and the decision 50 years ago to separate the right to adequate housing and the right to life which were originally articulated in a single document: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ever since the advent of the two human rights Covenants divorcing social, economic and cultural rights from civil and political rights, housing has been treated more as a policy aspiration than as a fundamental right; doing so severed it from core human rights values of dignity, security and the right to life that would demand timely rights-based responses and access to justice.
I have been convinced by the artificiality of this separation in my interactions with those experiencing housing deprivation; they understand the deep connections between the right to life and the right to housing. They articulate their human rights claims not simply as a demand for housing with basic services and secure tenure, but also more fundamentally as a claim to equal recognition of their right to live in dignity and security. They report that they are not treated as humans and are called encroachers, vermin and criminals simply for attempting to survive. They experience being forgotten and neglected by governments as a sustained and systematic devaluing of their lives.
