The right to housing in an ownership society

The last decade has seen the rise of a new alliance among U.S. housing advocates, human rights advocates, and right to the city advocates that stands unified in opposition to rising rents, gentrification, evictions, and the criminalization of homelessness. In contrast to earlier housing movements that often diverged over the question of means, this new “housing justice” alliance has the potential to unify housing advocates under the big tent of a cosmopolitan human right to housing and a collective right to the city. This paper provides a critique of the normative conception of justice implied by the contemporary American housing justice movement. I argue that while rights offer a compelling moral foundation for housing policy reform, the most defensible conception of the right to housing is one grounded in the individual right of social citizenship. I argue that the right to housing should be understood as a right that is constitutive of, rather than in opposition to, the right to own property. When the collective right to the city conflicts with or fails to support the right to housing, I argue that housing advocates should prioritize the right to housing over the right to the city.