Solarpunk Urbanism

Maybe your opinion is that housing is a human right but I’m not sure where you are drawing that definitive conclusion from. Are you saying it’s a legal right somewhere or that it’s your emotional stance?

The right to housing is a fundamental human right, according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many international treaties and agreements since. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights puts it:

Adequate housing was recognized as part of the right to an adequate standard of living in article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in article 11.1 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Other international human rights treaties have since recognized or referred to the right to adequate housing or some elements of it, such as the protection of one’s home and privacy.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing

Your personal experience has given you an incorrect belief regarding the human right to housing. I'm sorry to call you out so directly, but sometimes people need to hear hard truths. Facts don't care about your feelings.

There is a substantial argument for housing being a right, and also let's get real - it's bad for a government to be so unstable they can't give adequate housing to everyone. It'd bad at a societal level even if it theoretically didn't violate individual rights.

https://journals.openedition.org/interventionseconomiques/6499

51 Historical analysis reveals that American policymakers have consistently used happiness discourse and a specific notion of virtue to promote an ownership model of wellbeing. The eighteenth-century use of the term “happiness”—namely, a stable feeling of fulfillment and wellbeing that results from a virtuous way of life—was pivotal in forging a lasting rhetorical link between the pursuit of happiness and the lifestyle induced by property ownership. As if they were reading from James Truslow Adams’ playbook, subsequent generations of Americans appear to have unwaveringly stood up to save the American Dream of homeownership from any opposing forces (Adams 2017 [1931]). As the frontier reached the Pacific and small farmland became scarce, suburban crabgrass (Jackson 1985) became the next frontier to conquer for Americans in search of homeownership. As suburbanization fueled an urban crisis for many poor minorities, the Civil Rights Movement sparked political change in the 1960s that would attempt to give equal homeownership opportunities to all Americans regardless of skin color, sex, or origin. Then as unfavorable economic conditions made housing credit scarce, financial deregulation was used to keep the American Dream of homeownership alive. Even the subprime mortgage crisis, in which deregulation played a strong role, has barely put a dent in Americans’ attachment to the homeownership way of life.

From a theoretical standpoint, the long-term resistance and flexibility of this model, both in discourse and in practice, must be traced back to the fundamental contradiction between the universality of the principles enshrined in the nation’s founding documents, in which the link between the pursuit of happiness and ownership is institutionalized, and the reality of the racial, gender and class inequalities in the United States regarding property ownership. This is what makes the homeownership society a permanent horizon, a utopian dream for all Americans to strive for by overcoming whatever political, social, or economic obstacles they come across; and it’s the pursuit of this dream, not necessarily the achievement of it, that is presented as the gateway to happiness and virtue. As such, politicians can constantly reactivate this discourse to bolster support for either conservative or progressive policies that alternate between saving an ownership model in danger and expanding it toward new frontiers. By channeling political resistance toward the improvement or greater accessibility of a homeownership model, the validity of the model itself remains unquestioned. Happiness politics based on this model thus constructs and reconstructs loyalty to the American capitalist regime of private property by presenting obstacles to homeownership as an opportunity to defend the American way of life, while alternatives to the dream of homeownership are considered an un-American road to vice and unhappiness.

Of course, what is claimed in political discourse about homeownership and happiness should not be taken at face value, even if polls and the concrete living situation of the majority of Americans attest to a strong relationship between the two. While there is still more comparative research to be conducted on the strengths and weaknesses of renting and homeownership on various dimensions of wellbeing, this brief historical analysis may open up a new dimension somewhat specific to the United States. When homeownership has been culturally presented as the only virtuous and truly American gateway to happiness, can this lead to a feeling of being un-American, or a failed American, if one is either unable or unwilling to conform? To what extent is it important to have the same housing lifestyle as one’s fellow citizens to feel part of the national community? In other words, the effect of associating patriotic attitudes with specific ways of life—such as owning a house in the suburbs—on subjective wellbeing could be a new avenue to explore in happiness research.