I don't feel that housing is a human right. In fact I don't believe it is even possible for housing to be a human right.

Human rights cannot be rights for someone else to build or do something for you, because it inherently causes a restriction or obligation to someone else. Also it's possible that reality simply says the right cannot be provided, and reality tends to beat policy. For example if there are twice as many people who need housing as available houses, no amount of claiming that housing is a right is going to overcome the underlying reality. In fact this damages the whole idea of rights because a right should not be able to be denied but in this case this right exists "while supplies last". That's a goal not a right.

My free speech doesn't exist while supplies last. It doesn't require anyone to do anything for me to exercise it. It's simply the right I'm given as a human. If someone violates it a court should give me recourse but no one is obligated to do anything on my behalf.

I understand a lot of people disagree with this line of thinking but I really think these unprovidable rights do more damage to the idea of human rights then the benefit.

This isn't a rant against people having access to affordable housing. I support that goal but it takes careful planning and a lot of hard work. Simply calling it a right and leaving the details for someone else to solve achieves nothing.

> Human rights cannot be rights for someone else to build or do something for you

I disagree with this argument. Water access is a human right. There is an astounding amount of public water infrastructure and people operating this infrastructure. This is all publicly funded because we have agreed that no one should be without water. Why should housing be any different?

I don't think that publicly funding water makes it a human right. Society has just collectively decided to make it a public good in your example.

But if some human walks up to my front door and demands water, they have no inherent right that says I must provide it to them. As the commenter stated, that would impose upon me a force against my will, hence violating my rights of private property.

Let's take that example a step further: If someone could come to my house and demand water and I wad compelled to provide them with it, what would stop them from setting up a water bottling operation, of which I am funding?

It sounds like you're describing the argument of positive rights vs. negative rights. Then couldn't water rights be expressed as "people cannot be deprived of access to clean and potable water"?

Correct, I am describing exactly that.

And to your point, I would agree, but only insofar as the water that people are not being denied access to is not privately owned.

For example, you taking water out of the ocean, desalting it, and then consuming it is perfectly fine. Nobody owns the ocean. You haven't violated anyone's property rights. Me being forced to give you water that I have paid for would be a violation of my property rights, thus it would be deemed a positive right, and rights in the US are not positive.

This is the same for housing. Nobody should be denied the use of their private property as they see fit (zoning laws would be a consideration upon purchase). Thus, housing is a negative right in that nobody would stop anyone from setting up a tent or living nomadically on their own property. This already exists today!

The problem comes into play when people try to institute positive rights on housing which either force someone into an involuntary transaction through providing time/resources to build someone else a house or via forcing them to allow people to use their privately held land as a camping site.

So what happens to the people who don't have property? Do they lose the right to exist in every particular place? Do they, then, lose the right to life itself? Or, if they sleep somewhere forbidden, does society grant a positive right to freedom from the nuisances of theft, vagrancy, and public defecation -- protections provided by public funds through police and prisons?

There are bounties of people with wealth that gladly give charitably. Many organizations, especially religious institutions, exist with a core mission of helping the impoverished. Why everyone pushes the responsibility of helping their community off to the government is beyond me, especially given the clowfare which are our politicians. Nobody would ever give them the reigns to a business because hardly any of them have experience in business.

Could more be done, of course! But the problem is that the government keeps requiring people to give them money so they can do the job, which leaves everyone else worse off since government never spends more efficiently than the private sector. I lose ~30% of my income immediately. Think what could be done with it if I were to allocate it instead of the government.

Not having property is not proper justification for violating the rights of others.

Edit: let me tack on that nobody benefits from impoverished citizens. They are a net drag as they need supporting either through charity or through social programs. It is in everyone's best interest to help end it, but of course you cannot violate the rights of others which means you cannot forcibly hold a mentally sick person against their will, for example. The problem with social programs is everyone shrugs off the duty because "the government is fixing it" while ignoring the whole of the moral hazard each and every new government program creates.

Buy some land and drill your well for water. Nothing preventing water access.

> Human rights cannot be rights for someone else to build or do something for you, because it inherently causes a restriction or obligation to someone else.

One person's right is always another person's obligation.

There is no other way to have a meaningful right of any kind.

> Also it's possible that reality simply says the right cannot be provided, and reality tends to beat policy. For example if there are twice as many people who need housing as available houses, no amount of claiming that housing is a right is going to overcome the underlying reality.

This is equally true about all other rights. For example, there may be inadequate resources to enforce a right against being murdered.

In a sense, as long as there still are murders, then this is actually is the case.

However, in the housing case, it's counterfactual. There are no non-social resource constraints. Homeless people aren't even allowed to set up their own tents.

It's a cruel kind of gaslighting to suggest there are inherent resource limits when we can all watch videos of cops slashing those tents and evicting entire encampments. It's just not reality. Bringing that kind of counterfactual unreality into a political discussion of a stark situation is not being good to the people affected.

>One person's right is always another person's obligation

You are failing to understand the distinction.

All rights and laws depend on governments and courts. That obligation is around interpretation and enforcement, not the provision of the right itself.

My right to free speech does require governments and courts only at the enforcement level. No other person ever has to do anything for me to have that right. In fact I don't have to do anything to have that right. I have it whether I exercise it or not.

The same is not true about housing or food. A court could decide that someone has a right to those things but it's still not going to happen until the resource exists to provide. Someone has to make those things. That's not just enforcement or interpretation. It's buying fertilizer, it's nailing boards together.

>One person's right is always another person's obligation

So no, this fails to hold up to simple scrutiny

> All rights and laws depend on governments and courts. That obligation is around interpretation and enforcement, not the provision of the right itself.

This distinction doesn't matter. You can't have meaningful, substantive rights, without an adequate governmental budget that is allocating resources toward your specific needs.

If you live in Chinatown (the place in the movie), then you don't have the SUBSTANTIVE right not to be murdered, because the police will enforce nothing. Your rights are taken away in reality.

But in your paper fantasy, you still have the rights because of some paper somewhere, even though you are dead.

In the real world, a right without an enforcement budget is no right at all.

In the US, rights are defined as things in which the government and private parties cannot take away.

As you've stated, a society will break down if there is no enforcement of rights as it is equivalent to them not existing. This is because the government is the sole definer of rights, and they only exist because the government has the will and ability to enforce them.

Neither housing nor water are human rights in the US because they, as the commenter stated, require you infringe on someone else's private property (resources, time) to provide them.

This may be different under other governments depending on how rights are defined in their society, but in the US it is absolutely not the case.

Again, how rights are defined on paper is different from how the real world is.

In the USA, law isn't only defined by statute, it's also defined by the courts through case law.

The courts in the USA have some doctrines like "substantive due process" that say at least sometimes the law will look also at real rights that people can actually exercise, and not just paper rights.

> Neither housing nor water are human rights in the US because they, as the commenter stated, require you infringe on someone else's private property (resources, time) to provide them.

And yet as a matter of inevitable biology, every other right derives from access to water. A person without water lacks all other rights and all capacity for exercise of any right (e.g. speech).

The American court system as defined by corporate statutes has shown itself incapable of, nay, unwilling to uphold rights of the people.

The dead "person" corporation government model has provided a level of abstraction that lends to callous disregard to "un-a-lien-able" rights. It has given the government an interface with which to fasten liens upon people disregarding the Declaration of Independence.

Rights are fundamentally a social construct. So the question is not 'what are rights?', but 'how do we define rights?' And there isn't any reason that we have to define rights to only include negative rights, not positive rights. In fact, that kind of a definition would be inconsistent - what value does freedom of speech have without the economic (housing, food, etc.) stability and education (both positive rights) needed to thoughtfully participate in society? What's the point of property rights (negative) if you don't have any property (positive)?

    Also it's possible that reality simply says the right cannot be provided, and reality tends to beat policy.
    I support that goal but it takes careful planning and a lot of hard work. Simply calling it a right and leaving the details for someone else to solve achieves nothing.

This is true of any right. Freedom of speech, the right to vote, etc. did not appear out of nowhere. They were the result of people fighting for them - either making revolution or pressuring governments into guaranteeing those rights. Those fights took a lot of planning, work, and sacrifice. In the same vein, if there was enough political drive to give everyone housing, at least in the West we have enough wealth to achieve that.

>Human rights cannot be rights for someone else to build or do something for you, because it inherently causes a restriction or obligation to someone else

What are intellectual property rights?

Isn't it exactly the safeguarding of private property since IP is by definition, property?

Well, definitions are what you make them.

If, as you say, IP is property and if property rights are human rights, then it follows that human (and property) rights can take away property rights, compel people to do things, or force them to do other things than they would like.

I think this contradicts the grandparent's claims about what rights are, and they rub me the wrong way, because I think there's a creed that gets repeated by libertarians who use it to forestall thought.

We all agree that slavery is not acceptable; therefore defining a concept as property does not make it legitimate.

Given a known counterexample, the possibility that any form of property is illegitimate or ill-defined must exist.

I refuse to commit to any definitions, instead I'm demanding uncertainty.

Here is an interesting Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage

> If, as you say, IP is property and if property rights are human rights, then it follows that human (and property) rights can take away property rights, compel people to do things, or force them to do other things than they would like.

People are only compelled or forced to do other things than they would like in that they are being disallowed from using someone else's property. This is in stark contrast to forcing someone to do something they don't want to do. Negative vs. positive rights.

Slavey is only unacceptable because the slave is a third party to the transaction who is unwilling to voluntarily enter it. That is much different than disallowing someone the use of something that does not belong to them. You cannot force someone not to work a job because you don't want them to. It's the same thing. If you were to force them not to work a job you don't want them to, you would be violating their rights by impeding on their right to engage in voluntary transactions.

Illegitimate and ill-defined property exists. It is first and foremost job of the government to be the arbitrator of legal contract such the ambiguity around Illegitimate and ill-defined property is removed.

Debt bondage is a classic form of slavery. Thankfully it's not generally legal since the obligation is not properly defined legally. If it were, then there would be recourse for breaking the contract, and a process of insolvency which would remediate the debt. In fact, the outlawing of voluntary transactions is what breeds the possibility for these types of markets as the debt payoff is typically accomplished through sex trafficking or drug related activities. This is done so the victim has a disincentive from contacting state enforcement agents as they would have to implicate themselves in a crime to do so.

This is in interesting take. Never thought about it like that

For a deeper dive on this theory take a look at:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

Basically my belief is that positive rights should be labeled as goals whereas only negative rights can be called true rights

Goals can be avoided or punted. By calling housing a "right", we elevate it as an imperative, not just something to be shrugged off. It is explicitly the purpose to make the issue more difficult to avoid.

It is a game of semantics, sure, but so is the distinction between positive and negative rights. People are still obligated to act to uphold your negative rights as well, through law enforcement and court proceedings. But they are not compelled by force - those are voluntary jobs just like everything else, and they are paid for their service by the government (or taxpayers).

The same would be true for housing. Property is bought by the government (or built at its expense), and the humans involved in making that happen are compensated as well. The costs for this will be added to our taxes (as are the costs for roads, courts, and everything else that makes our society liveable).

Of course, that is contingent on people actually paying a fair amount in taxes. Most people who support housing as a human right are also in favor of closing tax loopholes and raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy.

Morally speaking, your access to the resources required to sustain life should not be dictated by how useful you can make yourself to someone richer than you. We no longer live in a world where the production of every person's needs necessitates the active participation of every person. World hunger for example is no longer a supply problem, it's a distribution problem.

We now have machines and automation capable of extracting and producing all human needs with relatively very little human effort. We can power them through renewable energy sources far more productive than human labor. In fact, there is so much automation that workers are becoming displaced by machines and cannot find meaningful ways to contribute (some may be retrained as machine operators/maintainers, but as dictated by capitalism, they will always be far fewer than the amount of workers displaced). We are in, or on the cusp of, a post-scarcity society (for physical needs), and the systems that manage the production and distribution of resources must be rethought. The only reason that scarcity still exists in this marketplace is because the owners of those systems still demand obscene profits so that they can go on joyrides in space. The actual costs of maintaining the systems would be much lower if the end goal wasn't quarterly growth.

I've focused on food here, but the situation for housing can be similar. Additionally, housing and real estate are seen as investments that should grow in value over time, which leads to perverse incentives and pressures that are not inherent to solving the actual problem of housing people, and which drive prices far higher than the actual costs a government would need to take on.

In your example, if housing was a right, then it would be nonexcludable by definition, as the government cannot impede on your rights.

So making housing a right doesn't mean the government will use taxpayer money to purchase and supply housing for only those without housing. On the contrary, it would compel the government to provide housing for every individual in the country, as rights are not exclusive to citizens (save voting and public office in some instances).

< Goals can be avoided or punted. By calling housing a "right", we elevate it as an imperative, not just something to be shrugged off. It is explicitly the purpose to make the issue more difficult to avoid.

I think your more interested in marketing than reality buddy

The reality is that marketing is a fundamental part spreading ideas, which is a fundamental part of democracy (and politics in general).

It doesn't really matter if housing as a human right doesn't fit some narrow implied definitions of 18th-century philosophers or statesmen. We live in a different world now, with technology, possibilities, and circumstances that are wildly different. People can no longer simply homestead out on the open land; everything is already owned by someone else, and the cost to buy/rent it is far outpacing the reach of the average person. The deprivation of physical space is a direct threat to a person's livelihood, and this simply wasn't a problem in the age of the manifest destiny.

A new age comes with new problems which require new solutions, which must be implemented by spreading new ideas. Changes occur when a critical mass of people and politicians believe that change is possible and required. So yes, calling it a "right" is marketing, because in a democracy that is how you get things done.

Well I agree marketing is effective. But what's the argument for housing as a human right? You say "It doesn't really matter if housing as a human right doesn't fit some narrow implied definitions of 18th-century philosophers or statesmen." but that doesn't argue why it should be a human right nowadays. Lot's of philosophers and statesmen of today wouldn't agree it is a human right.

I'm a Canadian living in oven of our traditionnaly low cost city, Montréal. Over the past few months, I've seen the market explode wat put of reach of our average salary.

Housing should be a national interest and something that we work to make as obtainable by the largest portion of our citizens.

Owning multiple houses and flipping to keep the market surging should not be legal.

I'm not surprised to see this happening. Quite a few friends of mine have moved to Montreal, precisely because they couldn't afford to live in Vancouver. I know folks in Toronto who have witnessed the same. A city can only absorb so much of the country's supply problem until it's overwhelmed by demand -- and then it turns into a "hot market" with all the drawbacks that entails.

The people moving in these examples are doing precisely what they should be: moving to somewhere they can afford.

They've been priced out of the market, and that's okay. This process is exactly what grows populations in other cities.

Without private property ownership, the entire rental market would cease to exist. Often people purchase homes in disrepair, fix them up, and rent them out. The rental income is precisely what incentivizes this process. If there was no yield, people wouldn't do this and there would be even less housing available.

Anecdotally, I believe in Amsterdam there are restrictions such as a house can't remain vacant for more than x months. There may be some merit to that, but I still really dislike it. It basically says "you don't own your private property".

People love to say everything is a "human right" - IMO human rights should delineate what you can't be deprived of - not what you have the "right" to force others to provide to you if you do not have the capacity to be self sufficient

There is no possible delineation. Anything you can't be deprived of is a thing that others are forced to provide you under state compulsion. What falls under that category is up to social consensus, and is subject to change and debate, as we're seeing with housing now in response to skyrocketing prices and the perverse incentives of the prominence of a house as a reliable investment vehicle.

>> Anything you can't be deprived of is a thing that others are forced to provide you under state compulsion.

The state can’t take away my guns. The state doesn’t have to buy me any guns.

Right. Not only is it not complicated, it couldn't be any more simple.

Absolutely not, the delineation is dead simple. If someone else gets an obligation because of my right it's not a right.

My right to own a gun, have free speech, against self incriminating, or against unlawful search and seizure require Absolutely no action on any person's part but mine besides the court to uphold them (which is true of all systems of rights. Having a court does not negate any of this).

The people who wrote the bill of rights were very aware of this delineation because they stayed exclusively on one side of it.

So you can disagree but to say the idea simply doesn't exist is nonsense.

You're right, it's the negative vs positive rights thing. So there for sure is a difference, and the stance that the government's purpose is to protect the rights of the empowered and to hell with anything that helps anyone else is a consistent viewpoint that I just strongly disagree with.

I dunno. Seems like the 4th amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure, the 5th amendment right against self-incrimination, and the 1st amendment rights for speech and religion (just to name a few) do more than just protect the empowered. Do you disagree?

I don't think any of those rights you mention avoid obligating other people.

What if you're my neighbor, exercising your free speech in person, and I don't want to hear it?

Your sound waves don't stop at my property line. But there are definite limits on what I could do in response.

https://nypost.com/2020/10/26/bill-gross-accused-of-tormenti...

Hunters go traipsing across private property. Someone with a gun could shoot your dog, or mistake you for a deer. Living around people like that is a huge infringement or obligation of property owners.

Water rights.

So you would argue that the right to have a lawyer when accused of a crime is not a human right?

Education and Healthcare should be a human right. Once people have good education and health, then they should earn everything else (including housing). Otherwise everthing becomes free. I agree that housing has become an investment, which should be curbed. People should be prevented or taxed heavily if they buy second house. This will give the younger generation a chance to buy their first home.

Sorry, but I think you've got that backwards. Without food and housing, people don't have the energy to pursue education in any meaningful way, and their healthcare will be more complicated.

>Once people have good education and health, then they should earn everything else (including housing).

How can you possibly have "good health" without also ensuring housing? Isn't it kind of impossible to be truly healthy if you are homeless.

Why do you think it's not enforceable? You can prevent any kind of house ownership or change incentives with taxation. Random example: Taxing non-primary residences. Taxing rental income etc.

I think this kind of dual relationship can only hold until the two come into conflict for a large group of people. There's no issue (except philosophically) if food is a commodity that costs 1 penny per lifetime to eat.

It's only when many people face being deprived of their right to eat due to its status as a commodity. That's when you see revolution, insurrection, mob violence, all the rest. Housing isn't there yet certainly, but who knows how far off it might be.

Those who work to produce housing would still be compensated, as are all government employees. The money would come from taxes, and taxes would be increased on those who are obscenely wealthy in excess of their needs or realistic aspirations.

To make it more apt, if a commodity such as housing is declared to be a human right, perhaps all those who own the commodity in excess of their needs should be taxed heavily to pay for homes/shelters for the unsheltered. It is, after all, their opulent greed that is strangulating the market and making home ownership difficult to begin with.

So then it's not a right. It requires compelled labor of yourself or someone else, not something you are granted simply for existing that can be taken away.

Chattel slaves were compensated with a roof over their head, food, facilities. All their needs were met at the hands of the wealthy. All they had to do in return was work. After all, their owner was entitled to their labor by virtue of paying for them and meeting their needs. Surely the state would never utilize this same reasoning on a populace that's wholly dependent on its provisions.

Who determines need? Who determines excess? We don't need restaurants, entertainment, video games, etc. We should just eat nutritionally complete kibble for humans, and all work solely to ensure everyone else's needs are met.

> It is, after all, their opulent greed that is strangulating the market and making home ownership difficult to begin with.

Prove it. Spoiler: you can't.

You're describing a public good, not a right.

If housing was a right, the government would be compelled to provide it for everyone, not matter their income or wealth, as it would have to be nonexcludable.

This is what Finland has effectively done, and everyone is better off for it.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-sunday-edition-for-janua...

They're calling it a "right", but it does not meet the US definition of a right as it is, definitively, a positive right whereas the US only defines negative rights as human rights.

If the US wants to adopt this model as a social program, I would respect the implementation of a strings-free service much more than the strings-attached approach that currently exists. As the article says, eradicating homelessness is more about getting a roof over someone's head than prequalifying them on "good behavior" before doing so. The outcome of the Finnish program is not surprising to me in the least.

Regarding the Finnish "right" of housing, I do have this question... I cannot find the actual program documentation. My question is as follows: if I'm Finnish and make $14 billion euros a year, will the gov still provide me free housing?

Yes, we should all strive to emulate tiny, culturally homogeneous de facto ethnostates. Their policies will surely work in gigantic, culturally hyper-heterogeneous nations that already struggle with bureaucratic bloat, public service abuse, and horrid quality of public goods and services.