Why a Right to Housing Is Needed and Makes Sense: Editors’ Introduction

IT IS UNCONSCIONABLE that in the 21st century, upwards of 100 million people in the United States live in housing that is physically inadequate, in unsafe neighborhoods, overcrowded or way beyond what they realistically can afford. Yet it could be quite different. We could and should guarantee high-quality, truly affordable housing in “good” neighborhoods for all and thus finally achieve the National Housing Goal of “a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” as articulated by Congress over a half-century ago in the 1949 Housing Act and reaffirmed in subsequent legislative initiatives.1 This book embraces the view that a commitment to a Right to Housing should be the foundation not only for housing policy but also for a new social agenda. The call to adopt and implement a Right to Housing not only has an ethical basis in principles of justice and ideals of a commonwealth. It is also based on a highly pragmatic perspective— the central role that housing plays in peoples’ lives. Given the many ways in which housing is, or can be, the basic building block for a range of related benefits—personal health and safety, employment opportunities, a decent education, security of tenure, economic security—a host of new social relationships and economic opportunities would emerge if a Right to Housing were realized, and the extensive negative impacts of poor housing would largely disappear. A Right to Housing would also go a long way toward countering the pernicious trend toward our society’s extremes of material well-being and opportunity—a trend that is creating larger and larger fissures between the nation’s richest and most of the rest of us—but most especially the poorest among us—disparities that have a clear racial dimension as well and that make true democracy impossible. Just over 60 years ago, in his 1944 State of the Union address to Congress, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared that economic security is a necessary ingredient for a democratic society. He further asserted that there was a need for a whole series of economic and social rights, including a Right to Housing. This is part of his message: