Six Reasons Why Housing is a Human Right
A Law Professor Makes the Case
Image from Wikimedia Commons
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on March 28, 2025.
I am thrilled that one of my favorite publications, Shelterforce, published this piece by me earlier this week. You can read the article in its entirety on their website for free by clicking here.
Here is how the piece begins:
Don’t read the comments.
Or, sometimes, the emails.
Writing about housing in media outlets can lead to pushback, especially when referring to housing as a human right.
“Housing is a human right? How?” a reader named “Stabilizer” asked in response to one of my columns. “Housing is a human NEED. Also food, sex, and vacations on a nice tropical beach.”
A local lawyer emailed me directly, in part to criticize our law school clinic’s work representing low-income tenants facing eviction. But he was particularly upset with my rights reference. “I am an alum of the school where you teach, so I was appalled to read you refer to housing as a human right,” he wrote. “As you well know, not only is housing not a human right, it never can be one.”
Of course, I do not “well know” that. But the lawyer and other commenters have a point. There is not yet a right to housing explicitly included in our U.S. Bill of Rights, nor has the U.S. Supreme Court yet ruled that it is implied in the Constitution. “We are unable to perceive in that document any constitutional guarantee of access to dwellings of a particular quality,” Justice Byron White wrote in the 1972 case of Lindsey v. Normet.
Yet when our client JaNay is struggling to get her landlord to address widespread mold and a roach infestation, when Curtis is sleeping in his 2012 Chevy after being evicted, and Tanya and her kids can’t even get on the long-closed local subsidized housing waiting list, there is a strong argument that these are all human rights violations. Six strong arguments, in fact:
You can read all of those arguments on Shelterforce’s site here: https://shelterforce.org/2025/03/25/six-reasons-why-housing-is-a-human-right/
Let me know if you disagree with any of them, or if I am missing an argument you think we should be making! As always, thanks for reading.
