The Right to Housing According to Raquel Rolnik

The right to housing is the human right to live in a safe, affordable and decent place, recognised in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966, and its best-known advocate in urbanism is Raquel Rolnik, the Brazilian architect and planner who was United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing from 2008 to 2014. Her thesis is that the right exists in treaties and many constitutions, but that the policies of recent decades have hollowed it out by treating housing as a commodity and financial asset, and that recovering it requires social movements, regulation and a state that guarantees rather than facilitates.

The seven conditions of adequate housing according to the UN

The content of the right is precisely defined. General Comment 4 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, from 1991, sets seven conditions of adequate housing: legal security of tenure, availability of services, affordability, habitability, accessibility, adequate location and cultural adequacy. General Comment 7, from 1997, prohibits forced evictions without alternatives. Rolnik insists that adequate housing is not just a roof but a place in the city, with transport, school and work nearby, so that a block on a periphery without services can violate the right even with a title deed.

Rolnik as rapporteur: the gap between right and policy

As rapporteur, Rolnik documented the gap between right and reality. Her missions to the United States after the 2008 crisis, to Spain at the height of evictions, to the United Kingdom over the bedroom tax and to Brazil before the World Cup and the Olympics showed a pattern: states that privatised public stock, deregulated rents, subsidised mortgages and demolished settlements for mega-events, in the name of efficiency and investment. Her 2012 report on the financialisation of housing concluded that the credit system, far from universalising access, had transferred risk and debt to families and homes to funds.

Social movements: from Brazil's homeless to the PAH

Rolnik places social movements at the centre of guaranteeing the right. In Brazil, the right to housing entered the Constitution in 2000 under pressure from homeless movements, and the City Statute of 2001 provided instruments to enforce the social function of property. In Spain, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, born in 2009, stopped evictions and won second-chance laws and moratoria. In South Africa, the Grootboom case of 2000 obliged the state to attend to those without shelter. The right, in her reading, is won and defended in the street as much as in the courts.

Policies that guarantee the right: public stock, regulation and tenure

The policies that guarantee it are known. Sufficient public and cooperative stock, as in Vienna, where more than half the population lives in social or subsidised housing. Rent regulation and protection against eviction, as in Germany or Spain's housing law of 2023. Security of tenure for informal settlements, with upgrading instead of removals. And control over land and credit so that housing is not speculation's favourite asset. The Berlin referendum of 2021, in which 56 percent voted to expropriate large landlords, shows how far citizen demand has gone.

Rolnik's lesson is that the right to housing is realised not by declaration but by sustained political decision: every land law, every budget and every urban plan expands or shrinks it. A city that takes it seriously measures success by how many people live securely at an affordable price, not by how many homes are sold; and one that abandons it, she warns, turns the struggle for a place to live into the main source of inequality and urban conflict in the twenty-first century.