Is the United States Moving Toward a Human Right to Housing?
Most of the news we hear about housing in the United States is bad. Homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures are omnipresent, and housing assistance is hard to find. In some parts of the country, homelessness is being criminalized—either directly through laws that criminalize sleeping and camping in public places, or indirectly, through laws that try to hide homeless populations, such as the Orlando ordinance that requires organizations to obtain permits to feed groups of twenty-five or more people in city parks. (Because the Orlando ordinance also states that only two permits a year will be issued for any one park, it means that organizations conducting large-scale feedings have to move from place to place—making it difficult for homeless people to establish a routine.) Debates about homelessness have even surfaced at Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy demonstrations across the country, where some protesters welcome homeless people, and others worry that their presence adds unwelcome complications to the Occupy movement.
But there has been some good news about housing in 2011, and it’s from an unexpected corner: human rights law. The United States has long lagged behind other countries when it comes to recognizing a human right to housing. The United States has signed but not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the major international human rights instrument acknowledging “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living . . . including adequate food, clothing, and housing.” Unlike other countries, such as South Africa, the U.S. Constitution does not provide its citizens with such a right, and efforts to push the U.S. Senate to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights have stalled.
All of this background makes the events of 2010 and 2011 seem even more exceptional. As Eric S. Tars and Déodonné Bhattaraiwrite in the 2011 Special Issue of Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy:
Over the course of 2010 and early 2011 an extraordinary series of events opened the door to discussion about housing as a human right in the United States. The Universal Periodic Review began with a nationwide consultation involving thousands of community participants and culminated in an international review of human rights in the United States in Geneva in November. At this review the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) affirmed for the first time the relevance of an international human rights mechanism to its role in setting domestic housing policy. Five months later, again for the first time, the U.S. Department of State, in consultation with HUD, supported recommendations on affordable housing and protecting the rights of homeless persons, among others, in response to the Universal Periodic Review. The following week the State Department announced a reembrace of economic and social rights, including the right to housing, after seventy years of treating them as second-class rights.
This remarkable progress shows how U.S. poverty law advocates can use international human rights mechanisms—such as the Universal Periodic Review—to help their clients. The 2011 Special Issue of Clearinghouse Review, titled Human Rights: A New (and Old) Way to Secure Justice, contains articles from practitioners and academics demonstrating how poverty law practitioners can harness the power of international human rights law to work for their clients. With case studies from across the country and as far away as Australia, Clearinghouse Review’s 2011 Special Issue is a must-read for any poverty lawyer trying to approach his or her work from a new angle. It should as well be essential reading for members of Congress as they consider the final fiscal year 2012 levels of funding for HUD’s affordable housing programs. Without the dollars necessary to sustain these housing programs, a human right to housing is essentially meaningless to the millions of families in need.
