9
Lessons from Other Countries and Our Own History
My visit to Vienna was inspiring … and embarrassing.
The inspiration came from witnessing firsthand what the New York Times has called a “renter’s utopia.”1 I toured the legendary Karl-Marx-Hof, a municipal housing complex that spans more than a kilometer and includes more than twelve hundred apartments. The residents of those apartments pay a maximum of 25 percent of their income to live in flats that can be as large as four bedrooms. Many feature expansive balconies with colorful geraniums cascading down their front, looking out over courtyards graced with towering chestnut trees and modern playgrounds.
At Karl-Marx-Hof’s official opening on October 12, 1930, Vienna mayor Karl Seitz said, “When we are no longer here, these stones will speak for us.” And they do, along with the 380 other municipal “estates” built in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s that ultimately housed a quarter million people.2
I visited some of the other complexes built during the era, including the Suditroler Hof in the city center and the Goethe Hof, where some of the apartment balconies overlook the Danube. Most are built around spacious courtyards, where I saw older residents sitting on benches, chatting or reading while children played soccer on the grass. The buildings are scattered throughout the city, and the two-hundred-plus architects enlisted to design them assured there is variety in both structures and layout.
This Viennese municipal housing was built and managed by the government, making it akin to what we call public housing in the US. The early twentieth-century municipal housing boom has not been repeated at that scale, but there is still decommodified housing being built in Vienna. Today, that housing is created mostly by limited-profit associations, organizations that often receive subsidies in return for tight government restrictions on rent charged and a requirement that any profits be returned to social housing.3
These regulations pull Vienna’s municipal housing, limited-profit housing, and rent-restricted cooperatives all into the category of social housing. A hallmark is the range of household incomes of people living in these communities. Persons with incomes as high as US $77,000 annually, well above the city’s average, can qualify for subsidized housing.4 And even if their household income increases substantially after they move in, residents are allowed to stay. One member of Parliament who lives in municipal housing makes more than $105,000 per year.5
Social housing communities in Vienna are not only diverse, but they are also quite stable. Tenants’ long-term tenure in their apartments is guaranteed under the law. The amount of rent charged is calculated at a percentage of household income, which means that renters in Vienna are also protected from losing their home when illness or job loss occurs.6
These protections and the housing’s high quality make renting so attractive that half the city’s 1.8 million residents live in subsidized housing.7 A US Department of Housing and Urban Development publication marvels that Vienna has avoided the common pitfalls of housing in our country: “[Viennese] housing developments do not devolve into middle-class enclaves nor do they become stigmatized concentrations of poverty.”8 The city has virtually no visible homeless population and no “slum” areas of concentrated poverty and low-quality housing.9
The sheer volume of Viennese social housing, along with its mixed-income nature, also has a price-dampening effect on for-profit housing, which is forced to compete with high-quality subsidized housing.10 That competitive pressure combines with vigorous rent control on private housing to make Vienna one of the cheapest renting cities in all of Europe, even on the for-profit market.11 Because good housing is central to both a household’s and a city’s well-being, it is no surprise that Vienna is ranked virtually every year as the most livable city in the world.12
That was the inspiring part. The problem was that I did not take in these marvels alone. As we walked and talked, my Viennese companions, experts on the local housing situation, were polite enough to ask about the housing situation in my own community and country. That was where the embarrassment came in.
Armin Puller, a Vienna city councilor and political science professor at the University of Vienna, showed me several social housing complexes, explaining that anyone with an urgent housing need can be placed in a municipal housing unit immediately. How was I supposed to tell him that we have an official US homeless population of nearly six hundred thousand—widely acknowledged to be a significant undercount—and three of every four households eligible for a federal housing subsidy don’t get it because of underfunding?13
Puller told me that tenant protections under Viennese and Austrian law are so strong that “evictions are really not a thing here… . After all, people need to live someplace, right?” I could not argue with his rhetorical question, of course. But I felt compelled to admit that in my city alone, hundreds of people are forcibly removed from their rented homes every week.
Puller grew up in the same community that he now represents on the city council. At his recent elementary school reunion, Puller and virtually all his classmates realized they still lived in the same district. Unlimited renting tenure in Vienna social housing means people tend to move into their flats in their twenties or thirties and never leave. If the residents wish, they can pass apartments to their family members on the original terms the parents signed on to.
That is my cue to confess that most of our eviction clients are living with year-to-year leases, and thus are always at risk that their landlord will choose not to renew. By now, I was getting the impression that Puller was becoming grossed out by our treatment of renters and was just too polite to say it. I decided not to mention that many of our clients are even forced to accept month-to-month lease terms.
Puller explains that living in a well-designed, well-maintained, and attractively located municipal or limited-profit housing apartment causes no stigma in Vienna. His mother lived out her final years in a municipal apartment that had been in the family for over six decades. She paid the equivalent of about US $300 per month. I nodded, choosing to keep to myself that the unfunded neglect of public housing here often leaves it so dilapidated and dangerous that my clients dream of leaving if they could just afford to do so.
I did not feel any better about my community and country when I talked with Maria Maltschnig and Sebastian Schublach of the Renner Institute, the political academy of the Austrian Social Democratic Party. Maltschnig and Schublach walked me through Vienna’s social housing origin story, which began after World War I.
In the postwar elections, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party gained power, ushering in an era known as “Red Vienna.”14 The new government leaders inherited a housing crisis so dire that overcrowding forced 170,000 Vienna residents to become what were called “bed-goers,” leasing bed space to sleep in shifts. Dozens of strangers were forced to share a single sink and toilet, while still paying extremely high rents.15 Tuberculosis spread so readily in these cramped quarters that it was known across Europe as “the Viennese disease.”16
So the new Viennese government devoted its resources to building municipal housing complexes. These were named after figures like Karl Marx and George Washington, demonstrating the ruling party’s commitment to both its “social” and “democratic” missions.17 Then Nazi occupation stalled the progress, even though some of the social housing complexes became for a time de facto fortresses resisting fascist takeover.18 After World War II, the Social Democratic Party regained power, and Vienna renewed its commitment to ensuring housing is a fully realized human right.
The Social Democrats are still the party leading the government, which shines a spotlight on its social housing philosophy and history. “Contrary to other European cities, the treatment of municipal housing estates as an object of profiteering was always out of the question,” the City of Vienna’s website states. “The fundamental need that is housing and the possibility for all income groups to live in our city are more important than the financial gain achieved by just a few.”19
That approach predicts the progressive taxation that has always financed Vienna’s housing success story. The original municipal housing building boom was funded by “Breitner Taxes,” a system created by city finance councilor and former banker Hugo Breitner. Breitner Taxes featured aggressive levies on luxuries like champagne, horse racing, private villas, and domestic servants. The Karl-Marx-Hof onsite museum displays a Breitner Tax poster of the time depicting a frightened tycoon recoiling in horror as a muscular red arm grabbed bottles of the tycoon’s chilling champagne.
Apartment-dwellers helped finance the construction, too, but the vast majority of that revenue was collected from the highest-income residents. High tax assessments on unused land either raised a great deal of revenue or motivated private owners to sell to the government, which often repurposed the land for municipal housing.20
Although Vienna continues to have a very progressive tax structure, Schublach shows me a comparative analysis of the Austrian state’s housing expenditures that place it far below the costs incurred by other European nations like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.21 The reason, he and Maltschnig explain, is that limited-profit housing is the top source of new social housing, and it costs the government very little. Sale of land is tightly regulated, including a requirement that at least two-thirds of any large private land plots sold must be diverted to rent-limited housing.22 “Since the ground that can be built on is a limited resource, we don’t see housing as a fit for the private market,” Maltschnig says.
Eighty percent of Viennese residents are renters, and it appears most are quite content to stay that way.23 For someone like me coming from the US homeowner culture, this of course is surprising. The reason for renter contentment, Maltschnig says, is stability, pointing to rent control, unlimited tenure of leases, and the ability to pass apartments down among generations. There are also no US-style tax incentives for homeownership. “Broad acceptance by people for long-term renting instead of buying only comes with long-term stability,” she says. Maintaining excellent condition of social housing is a must, too. “The big thing about social housing here is that it’s not just for poor people. It is for the broad, middle class.”
As a final demonstration, Schublach takes me on a tour of the Sonnwendviertel neighborhood where he and his wife and two daughters live. This city-center area, developed over the past ten years on the site of a former massive rail yard, is now the home to more than fourteen thousand people, almost half of them living in subsidized apartments.24 A true “fifteen-minute city” where all necessary goods and services can be reached within a few minutes’ walk, there are four separate grocery stores that Schublach and his family can easily access. Last year, when he helped host a US delegation, Schublach was stunned to learn that this feature was uncommon in many US cities. “The idea of a food desert is inconceivable here,” he says.
Walking-distance access is a must, since the Sonnwendviertel is a car-free area. Buildings are flanked on one side by a fifteen-acre park and on the other by the Bloch-Bauer Promenade, where children ride scooters and bikes and adults sit at cafés or walk through ground-level retail stores, topped by upper floors dedicated to apartments.
Schublach’s family lives in one of those buildings, Gleis 21—Gleis translates to “track,” commemorating the area’s former use. The larchwood Gleis 21 is so attractive that a photograph of it was featured in a New York Times Magazine feature article on Vienna housing. It is owned and operated by a resident cooperative that houses thirty-eight apartments above a ground-floor coffee shop, music school, and an event space used for multiple performances each week. The top floor is dedicated to a rooftop garden, a large kitchen and dining area for entertaining and meetings, a library, and a sauna.
From that rooftop, looking west, we can see a gleaming black-and-silver building, eight stories stacked on top of a ground-floor commercial area featuring floor-to-ceiling mirrored windows. This is limited-profit housing, Vienna style. Since most residents of limited-profit housing are required to submit a down payment, it is often less accessible to the poor than pure municipal housing like the Karl-Marx-Hof. But I could not help but reflect on the fact that the monthly rent paid by this beautiful building’s residents is cheaper than the rent paid by our clients living in for-profit housing that is often roach-infested, leaky, and crumbling.
I decided not to spoil our tour by voicing that depressing observation. For the moment, I wanted to hold on instead to the hope that the US could someday follow Vienna’s lead and start building a renter’s utopia of our own.
Other Success Stories
Other cities and nations share Vienna’s commitment to ensuring that high-quality housing is available to all. Finland’s goal to fully end homelessness by 2027 may seem outlandish by US standards, but it is actually a realistic target for the Finns: unlike virtually every other nation, they have been steadily reducing homelessness since 1987.25 They rely on a model social housing program that fulfills the right to housing in Finland’s constitution with a Housing First approach that immediately places unhoused people into homes.26
Unlike in the US, the Finnish pipeline to social housing has no gaps where profiteering can interfere with either affordability or quality. Most of the land in the capital city, Helsinki, is owned by the municipal government, which also operates its own public construction company with funding provided by a public bank and the national housing agency.27 The result is that one of every six housing units in Finland is public housing.28 With this stellar housing system, it is no coincidence that Finland can lay claim to some of the same good vibes as Vienna: Finns have been ranked as the world’s happiest people six years running.29
In Singapore, three of every four residents live in government-developed housing, much of it on land cleared via eminent domain in the 1960s.30 The government proudly points to its public housing program as “a Singapore icon.”31 That is no idle boast. A World Bank publication in 2018 declared Singapore’s “the best public housing in the world”—and insisted that its success is quite replicable.32
That success is made all the more remarkable by how quickly it came about. At the time of Singapore’s independence in 1959, less than 10 percent of the population lived in public housing. Like the Viennese model, rapid build-up of public housing in Singapore was accomplished with careful attention to connecting the housing to nearby schools and public transportation. From the beginning, a mix of household incomes was included in the buildings, each of which also featured easy access to socializing and commercial spaces.
Hawaii state senator Stanley Chang, who has visited Singapore’s housing program multiple times and has sponsored legislation to replicate it in his home state, told me in an interview that Singapore’s success provides a definitive response to any social housing resistance in the US. “A big hill that we have to climb is that the neoliberals have won the argument in both parties that the government is always late, always over budget, and can’t do anything right,” Chang says. “So that is why it is mind-blowing for people to see in Singapore that 80 percent of the population lives in public housing, where it is not stigmatized, it is well-maintained, and it is constantly upgraded. When you see a program that works so incredibly well, it completely changes your view of the housing problem.
“A lot of the other housing solutions that we talk about might be 5 percent or 10 percent solutions,” Chang says. “But social housing in Singapore is a complete solution. It is a silver bullet. It is not one of many actions that need to be taken. It is the answer.”33
Social housing programs do not have to be one-size-fits-all. For example, Uruguay boasts a successful public housing program built on a federation of five hundred self-managed housing cooperatives.34 Spain, Chile, and Belgium all have built striking examples of architecturally beautiful social housing.35 Before the Margaret Thatcher government began underfunding and privatizing “council” housing in the 1980s, 42 percent of Brits lived in their version of public housing.36 In Sweden, workers unions have come together to form a cooperative that builds and manages housing, while a National Tenants Union bargains for tenant rights and lower rents, along with creating its own banking and housing cooperative.37
As with Vienna and Singapore, Sweden responded to its housing crisis by thoughtfully but urgently creating a large amount of high-quality subsidized housing. During the 1960s and 1970s, Sweden built a full one million affordable units, increasing Sweden’s net housing stock by 20 percent.38
The US should take note, housing researchers Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper point out, since the “Million Homes Program” would equate in the US today to building 18.5 million homes over the course of a decade. Coincidentally enough, you may recall from chapter 6, eighteen million people in the US endure so-called “deep poverty,” trying to survive on incomes below $13,000 for a family of four.39 “The lesson which should be drawn from the Million Homes Program is that state financing of municipal housing can eliminate a major housing shortage over a short period of time,” Gowan and Cooper write.40 As we learned in chapter 8, Representative Ilhan Omar’s Homes for All Act calls for the US to build twelve million new social housing units.41
Given the huge amount of US vacant homes and apartments owned for tax or investment purposes, new construction is not the only option for quickly increasing the supply of subsidized housing. Since 2016, the Catalonia region of Spain has allowed the seizure of vacant corporate-owned apartments, which are then rented to low-income tenants.42 In 2021, Berlin residents passed a referendum to seize the property of large corporate landlords and convert the apartments to social housing.43 That is an attractive option in Germany, a renter-majority nation that shuns the many homeowner tax benefits the US provides. As we saw in chapter 8, rent control and eviction protections provide so much stability to German renters that the average tenancy lasts eleven years.44
There are many more international examples of effective housing policies. For example, there are persons in nations like Denmark, Greece, and the United Kingdom who are technically homeless, but almost all are provided access to provisional housing and a path to permanent housing.45 The US can and should follow the lead of these nations that have avoided the tragedies of our nation’s housing crisis, says California Assembly member Alex Lee, who has sponsored social housing legislation in his state. “When the Red Vienna period started, 25 percent of the people were homeless, people were starving and poor and defeated in the war. When Singapore began its program, it had just been decolonized,” he told me in an interview. “Compare that to the United States now, the most powerful and wealthy country in the world. Our state of California is the wealthiest state in the union. If Vienna and Singapore could do it, we certainly can do it.”46
I agree. And beyond these shining international examples, we can even look to our own history for social housing inspiration. The US has taken dramatic, positive action on affordable housing before.
As we saw in chapter 8, the US proved in the second half of the twentieth century that we are capable of building a great deal of public housing. And we proved in that same era that we can use housing investments—through the FHA and VA, for example—to pull millions of families into middle-class stability. We even have precedent for fixing the current problem of needed housing being kept vacant as tax shelters and “safe deposit boxes in the sky” investment vehicles—by seizing the property.47 (As mentioned in chapter 5, residential housing in the US is also a notoriously common vehicle for global money-laundering.)48 The US’s reputation for being a fierce protector of private property can obscure our surprisingly robust history of government seizures of that private property, particularly in times of economic crisis.49
All the same, there is one important element that many other nations possess that the US does lack: a clear legal commitment to recognizing and enforcing a human right to housing. But this too is a model we can and should follow.
Housing as a Human Right—Internationally
The email I received from a local lawyer was not a surprise. Mostly, it repeated many of the same themes I often see in response to articles I publish about housing. The lawyer talked about trusting the wonders of the capitalist real estate market to do right by all. He complained about how difficult it is for landlords nowadays, and that tenants facing eviction usually richly deserve their fate. He shared a story about alleged horrors inflicted by tenants in one of his legal cases.
But the lawyer’s email had an added twist: “I am an alum of the school where you teach, so I was appalled to read you refer to housing as a human right. As you well know, not only is housing not a human right, it never can be one.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt disagreed. When the concept of treating housing as a human right began to gain traction in the mid-twentieth century, it looked like the US would be a leader in the movement. In Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address, he proposed a “Second Bill of Rights,” which featured a right to a decent home.50 Then Eleanor Roosevelt served as chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), modeled in many respects on President Roosevelt’s blueprint. Mrs. Roosevelt played a key role in both drafting the document and securing its passage in 1948.51
The UDHR rejects the idea that housing is merely a privilege or a commodity. Instead, it considers housing to be a right possessed by every human being.52 Article 25 of the UDHR states, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing [emphasis added].”53 Unfortunately, the UDHR is not something our clients can carry into court and use to demand housing: it is not a treaty. But it is considered to be an indicator of “customary international law,” which suggests that it may be on the path to being enforceable one day.54
Fortunately for most people in the world, there is an enforceable global treaty on housing. In 1966, the aspirations of the UDHR were made concrete by the binding treaty language of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Article 11 of the ICESCR states, “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing.”55 Nations that are party to the ICESCR commit to “take appropriate steps to ensure the realization of this right.”56
This tracked with Roosevelt’s call for global governments to look forward and aim for a better future. “Too many who prate about saving democracy are really only interested in saving things as they were,” he said years before proposing his Second Bill of Rights. “Democracy should concern itself also with things as they ought to be.”57
Unfortunately, in the years after Roosevelt’s death, the US abandoned our leadership role on international economic rights. We are one of a handful of nations not to ratify the ICESCR, and the only one in the Americas or Europe not to do so.58 While President Jimmy Carter did sign the treaty in 1977, ratification requires that his signature be accompanied by the approval of two-thirds of senators, which has not occurred. Yet that presidential signature at least commits our government to refraining from actions that undermine its purpose, per the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.59
So the local landlord lawyer was partially correct, at least in the US. My guess, though, is that he was not thinking much about international law. More likely, he was referring to the US Bill of Rights, which has usually been interpreted by our courts as only protecting so-called “negative rights.” That means we prioritize civil and political rights that prevent government from doing things: interfering with free speech, integrity of home and person, etc. Think “Don’t Tread on Me” flags and bumper stickers. Other nations, and the ICESCR, also embrace “positive rights” that require affirmative government action on human needs like housing, food, and medical care.
But there is not yet any right to housing enshrined in US constitutional law. The Supreme Court in the 1972 case of Lindsey v. Normet said it found no right to housing arising out of the due process or equal protection clauses of the Constitution. “We are unable to perceive in that document any constitutional guarantee of access to dwellings of a particular quality, or any recognition of the right of a tenant to occupy the real property of his landlord beyond the term of his lease without the payment of rent or otherwise contrary to the terms of the relevant agreement,” Justice Byron White wrote. “Absent constitutional mandate, the assurance of adequate housing and the definition of landlord-tenant relationships are legislative, not judicial, functions.”60
While the US was shrinking at the notion of a human right to housing, other nations embraced it. The ICESCR commitments do not compel the government to provide a free home to each and every individual, but they do assign to the government the ultimate responsibility for ensuring a fully housed populace. If you or I can meet our housing needs through the for-profit market—as most Americans can—all well and good. But when the market fails to meet a person’s housing needs, the ICESCR says the government must step in, whether by subsidizing access to the private market or directly providing government-managed housing.61
The Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which interprets the ICESCR and monitors compliance with it, says this: “The human right to housing cannot be viewed in a narrow or restrictive sense which … views shelter as exclusively a commodity.” Instead, housing must be “ensured to all, regardless of income.” The committee understood that this assurance will likely cost money and made it clear that cost will not be an excuse for noncompliance. “Discharging such duties may require the mobilization of resources by the State, including by enforcing progressive taxation schemes,” the committee insisted.62
ICESCR compliance among its ratifiers is a mixed bag, but many nations take their ICESCR commitments very seriously. They have followed up on their ICESCR promises with guarantees of housing contained in their constitutions and/or statutes.63 Finland, Germany, South Africa, France, the Netherlands, and multiple other countries have created legal rights to housing in their national law and followed up with well-funded programs to ensure their enforcement.64
For example, the Homelessness Act of 2003 in Scotland ensures that anyone assessed as unintentionally homeless has a right to “settled accommodations in a local authority or housing association tenancy or a private rental.”65 Section 19 of the Constitution of Finland states, “Those who cannot obtain the means necessary for a life of dignity have the right to receive indispensable subsistence and care… . The public authorities shall promote the right of everyone to housing and the opportunity to arrange their own housing.”66
These laws do not magically create full housing, but they do set the stage for it. As mentioned, Finland is a global leader in reducing homelessness.67 Athens adopted a Homeless Bill of Rights that includes a right to housing, and the law included expanded temporary housing and street outreach and services.68 The City of Vienna’s official description of its legendary social housing program cites the human right to housing provisions in the European Social Charter.69 In Scotland, application of its law has made homelessness a “brief, rare, and a non-recurring phenomenon,” writes Eric Tars of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.70
Housing as a Human Right—the US
Despite the US so far ducking the ICESCR or constitutional commitments to housing, there is still a strong national legacy of acknowledging housing as a human right, in both word and deed. We saw in chapter 2 that federal housing support was robust in the middle of the twentieth century. Remember the words of Western Regional Advocacy Project director Paul Boden describing the US before we slashed $50 billion in affordable housing investments in the early 1980s: “Racism, poverty, and addiction all existed before 1982. What did not exist was a homeless shelter.”71 This previous deep well of funding reflected a tangible commitment to the goal of the US Housing Act of 1949: “a decent home and suitable living arrangements for every American family.”72
Eric Tars and others point out that, even without signing on to the ICESCR, the US has several times supported international human rights recommendations and reports that endorsed a right to housing.73 States including Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Illinois, the US territory of Puerto Rico, and municipalities like my hometown of Indianapolis have all adopted homeless bills of rights.74 Advocates in California and Connecticut are pushing to add the human right to housing in their state constitutions.75 Proposed legislation in Congress includes the “Housing Is a Human Right Act,” which would prohibit criminalization of homelessness and devote funds to affordable housing.76
More broadly, while the political philosophy of the US has traditionally been dominated by the view that individuals’ circumstances result mainly from their own choices, that attitude may be changing. In recent years, public understanding about the effects of structural racism and class discrimination appears to be increasing.77 So it should not be surprising that public opinion polling has shown both a great deal of contemporary concern about housing and a commitment to remedying the problem. A 2021 poll showed that two-thirds of Americans in growing metropolitical areas are “extremely/very concerned” about homelessness and the high cost of housing, ranking it as their number-one priority.78 Earlier surveys showed that three-quarters of Americans consider safe, secure housing to be a human right.79
Those Americans are not content for that right to be an abstraction: most of the people expressing support of housing as a human right also support expanded government programs to make that right a reality.80 As we will see in chapters 11 and 12, ballot initiatives and tenant organizing for increased housing investment and renter protections have been winning victories from coast to coast. Polling numbers suggest those victories may keep coming. In a 2020 survey, 63 percent of likely voters support federal investment in social housing, including 56 percent of Republicans and 53 percent of independent and third-party voters.81
These views are held at the very highest level of leadership in the nation. President Joe Biden is on record saying housing is a right, not a privilege.82 Marcia Fudge, Biden’s first secretary of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, has stated, “If we are to fully achieve justice in housing, we must fully accept what that means: justice in housing is everyone realizing the fundamental truth—housing is a human right.”83 The American Bar Association, the American Public Health Association, and the association of state and local human rights commissions have all officially endorsed an enforceable US human right to housing.84
In fact, the discussion of housing as a human right has become so commonplace that it inspired the scorn of liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in mid-2023. “Slogans can’t replace evidence-based policymaking that understands trade-offs and embraces nuances,” Kristof wrote. “It’s easy to say housing is a human right, but that doesn’t get anyone into a home.”85
I’m not so sure. I side with Eric Tars and the centuries of human rights history showing it is sometimes possible to speak a right into existence. “The human right to housing is a holistic and powerful frame, carrying the weight of international law and tapping into our deep cultural understanding of the importance of upholding human and civil rights,” Tars writes.
I agree. But that same human rights history shows that it takes a movement to turn a frame into a reality. Lucky for us, a vibrant, growing tenants’ rights movement is taking the stage in the US. We will learn more about that movement in chapters 11 and 12. But first, we’ll review what religious communities can contribute to the effort to make housing a fully realized human right.