Human Right to Housing

We partner with community organizations, leaders, and advocates in the fight for the right to participatory development that ensures decent housing and healthy and stable communities for all. 

In the United States, there is an overwhelming consensus that we face a severe market failure with regard to housing. There is also ongoing debate, analysis, and no shortage of opinions on how to address the “housing crisis.”  In the midst of this clamor, however, there lies a deafening silence on the lack of decent and affordable housing as a profound crisis of human rights. Cities and towns across the country have grown rapidly and re-developed without ensuring that the process of development safeguards and, more so, advances fundamental human rights. Public housing has been demolished and previously affordable housing has become prohibitively expensive. In this context, whole communities - mostly poor and working class, but increasingly the "middle class" as well - are continually being displaced from neighborhoods, in many cases where families have lived for generations. Increasing homelessness, overcrowding, and declining quality of life for families and individuals all painfully reflect the human costs of this predatory approach to development.