Resources

No housing program can be adequate or complete if it fails to provide for any substantial segment of our population. We can maintain neither a prosperous industry nor a prosperous nation if we do not bring better housing to more people.

- Pres. Harry S. Truman

Our nation’s current economic collapse highlights the serious crisis we face with respect to affordable housing, and the destructive consequences decades of failed federal housing policy have wrought.  The size of our population whose human right to safe, decent, and affordable housing is not met is at historically high levels and increasing. For example, over 15 million families pay more than 50% of their income on housing costs, and as many as 3.5 million Americans experience homelessness in a given year. Yet, over the past several decades government responses have only exacerbated the crisis, by decreasing the numbers of affordable housing units while doing very little to alleviate the underlining causes of poverty and homelessness.

Over the past several decades our nation has retreated from its long established commitment to providing every American with decent, safe and affordable housing.  To chart the decline in our government’s commitment to meet this need, consider these developments. In 1976, HUD’s budget was just over $86 billion. In the past three decades, however, this figure fell to approximately $34 billion. In the last eight years, specifically between 1999 and 2006, annual funding for public housing declined by 25%. To date, under the federal misnamed Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (H.O.P.E. VI) program 63,100 public housing units have been demolished and another 20,300 units are slated for demolition or redevelopment.

Since the program does not require one-for-one replacement, these units are not being replaced at nearly the same levels. In fact, studies suggest that less than 12% of those displaced from demolished units eventually move into the replacement housing. In addition to the crisis taking place within public housing, federal funding for housing vouchers (the Section 8 program) has been continually cut over the last 7 years. 300,000 families are currently at immediate risk of displacement due to a $2.4 billion shortfall in project-based funding. This occurs as poor communities are being displaced from urban areas due to gentrification, and the mortgage foreclosure crisis throws significant numbers of families, particularly economically vulnerable families, into distress.

The U.S. government passed the Housing Act of 1949, in which the government pledged to realize: “as soon as feasible . . . the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family, thus contributing to the development and redevelopment of communities and to the advancement of the growth, wealth, and security of the nation.” Additionally, international human rights instruments speak to the human right to housing. Article 25(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was unanimously adopted by all the member countries of the United Nations, states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well being of himself and of his family, including … housing”

Below are resources on the human right to housing, and ways that communities are organizing to ensure that this right is protected.

  • Audio Training: The Human Right to Housing: Human Rights Framing for Housing & Homeless Advocates >>>
  • Clearing the Way: Deconcentrating the Poor in Urban America >>>
  • NESRI Human Right to Housing Fact Sheet No. 1 >>>
  • NESRI Human Right to Development Fact Sheet No. 2 >>>
  • Promoting and Defending Housing Rights in the U.S. Manual >>>
  • Right to Housing Wiki >>>
  • There’s No Place Like Home: Revisiting Our Commitment to Housing the Poor >>>