Property and the right to housing: a critique

Some argue that the right to housing is best protected by a legal tenure. I call such a view the Property-Title View and read it as a conjunction of two theses: an ontological thesis, that legal title is partly constitutive of home-related activities, and a normative thesis, that the right to housing is a distributional problem to be met by allocating bundles of property rights. In this article I challenge both theses. Against the ontological thesis, I argue that legal title is neither necessary nor sufficient for a home, which is constituted by social relations rather than by legal tenure. Against the normative thesis, I argue that distributing title is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive, and that under the financialisation of housing the allocation of title does not secure one’s dwelling. The right protects ontological security, but not the legal title. International human rights law, as I show, already encodes this protective and tenure-neutral conception. Read through the tradition of the right to the city, it yields a more radical, socialist right to housing than its liberal philosophical counterparts.