What If We Treated Housing Like a Human Right?

When I began covering housing issues back in 2020, I focused on telling the stories of those who literally did not have a home. I spoke with heroin addicts outside the Colorado State Capitol, people who lived in their car during a brutal July 2022 heatwave, and women who sold sex just to survive the harsh reality of life on the streets.

What I didn’t realize, though, was just how commonplace the issue of housing in America has become. Yes, the housing crisis worsens the suffering of those already living in society’s periphery, but it also affects a far larger segment of the populace than I originally thought.

For example, I recently spoke with a friend who moved into a condo with his girlfriend. Both are college-educated, middle-class people in their mid-20s with relatively well-paying jobs. Yet, my friend told me that he’s had to come to grips with the fact that he may be a “renter forever,” and that nowadays, owning a house feels increasingly like “a fantasy.”

Homeownership, even for a couple like them, is becoming (if it isn’t already) unattainable. Roughly 43.5 million households in the U.S. spend more than 30 percent of their total income on housing; 22.7 million American renters spend a comparable amount. This is what the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University describes as “cost-burdened.” When more than a third of your paycheck goes toward rent or a mortgage, you have far less to spend on other necessities, like medicine, healthy food, or transportation.

Worse yet, about 16 percent of all households in the U.S. are “severely cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than half of their total income on housing.  Those who are “severely cost-burdened” are often one surprise expense away from homelessness, living constantly on the edge of dire poverty. While reporting for The Denver Post back in 2022, I spoke to one such woman, who lived in her car with her two kids. One of her children needed a medical procedure, forcing her to make the impossible choice between her kid’s health and paying rent. She, like any good mother, chose the former. Choices such as these highlight housing’s importance as a human right. And to be forced to go without it, writes author Matthew Desmond in his book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, is a profound societal failure.

“No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching,” he wrote, “can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.”

The Policies That Made Housing Unaffordable

There is no singular explanation for how we got here. Rather, there are several. In 2008, Wall Street greed (long-enabled by the U.S. government) caused the housing market to collapse, which sparked a global recession. An estimated 10 million families suddenly lost their homes due to foreclosure. For the millions of others who managed to keep their home, they owed astronomical amounts on their mortgages—in many cases, more than their homes were even worth. Construction companies scaled back operations for over a decade, causing a shortage of 4.7 million homes, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And in some corners of the country, meanwhile, big corporate investment firms like Blackstone and The Carlyle Group started purchasing foreclosed properties, turning neighborhoods into vast swaths of rental units.

Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the D.C.-based nonprofit the Urban Institute, told DAME that these firms have mostly played a “minor role” in the national housing crisis. But in the neighborhoods in which they’re investing, these corporations “have altered neighborhood composition to a large degree,” making it “more difficult for first-time homebuyers to come in.”

Local zoning laws throughout the U.S. haven’t helped, either. A zoning law basically dictates what gets built where. Land is typically divided into residential, industrial, commercial, and agricultural areas. For instance, in one portion of a city, only apartments and duplexes can be built; in another, only factories. Many of these laws are restrictive, meaning they only allow single-family homes to be put on certain chunks of land, making it illegal to build apartments, townhomes, or duplexes, which would lessen the competition over a single parcel of real estate by letting more people live on it.

The Pew Research Center has said that such zoning laws have rendered many cities (which tend to be where the best career and academic prospects are concentrated) more unaffordable, thus excluding low-income people from “the schools, jobs, and opportunities these communities offer.”

This partly explains why big cities have become so outlandishly expensive in recent years. “In high-demand areas — the places where people want to live most — zoning restrictions, such as those that make it impossible to build anything other than single-family homes, can limit housing supply and thus raise prices,” Freemark told DAME.

In the wake of 2008, construction companies also pumped the brakes on affordable housing projects, focusing instead on high-end real estate. In order to offset skyrocketing land prices, rising costs of building materials, and strict zoning laws, builders largely focused on whatever would net the most revenue. It’s led to a shortage of affordable homes all over the country.

Pew explained in a 2024 article that this shortage has caused “home prices to soar out of reach for many aspiring buyers,” citing the state of Virginia as an example. The average home price in Virginia rose from $225,000 in December 2013 to $372,000 in December 2023, per Zillow’s data.

Trump’s sweeping tariffs have placed yet another hurdle in the way of affordable housing, as they’ve caused lumber, steel, and copper to spike. Groups like the National Association of Home Builders and the Center for American Progress estimate that these tariffs have added anywhere from $10,9000 to $17,500 to the cost of building a new home.

It’s had an immediate effect on the housing market. Just this summer, home prices nationwide hit an all-time high. New data from the National Association of Realtors revealed that, in June 2026, the median price of a home in America was $440,660 (compare that to the median home price back in 2000: $119,600).

This, obviously, isn’t good — for any of us. Yonah Freemark told DAME that “there is no single solution to the housing crisis.”

Housing as a Human Right

People are correct to say we need more housing. But amid a broader affordability crisis, an important caveat is that we need more affordable housing.

Congress, somewhat surprisingly, has recently taken steps in the right direction. The ROAD to Housing Act passed both the House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support, despite Trump’s refusal to add his signature. But the president seemingly forgot to formally veto the bill, meaning it automatically became law in July. What it aims to do is curb private investment firms from buying more than 350 single-family homes, and use a $200 million annual grant program to incentivize local governments and tribes to increase their housing supply. Is it enough? No. But it is a start.

Look to New York City for some more optimism. Although it’s one of the world’s biggest and most expensive cities — the average home price in NYC exceeds $800,000, and the average cost of rent each month hovers around $4,100 — Mayor Zohran Mamdani has gone on the offensive. He’s effectively frozen the rent in about a million rent-stabilized apartments across each of the five boroughs. Mamdani has also rolled out a plan to build 200,000 new affordable homes and maintain another 200,000 existing ones, all while fast-tracking administrative procedures which stall construction and maintenance timelines.

After the Mamdani administration and the New York City Council balanced the budget, the mayor was able to allocate $22 billion in city funds to this ambitious housing project; $7 billion will go to building new affordable units; $4.9 billion for renovating the ones that already exist; and another $5.6 billion to overhaul the city’s current public housing system, which will help replace, say, a dilapidated elevator, speed up the response times of maintenance crews, and revive public housing units that’ve become run-down or left vacant.

Mamdani’s success in New York may explain, at least in part, why the Democratic Socialists of America (with which he is affiliated) are poised to win key elections throughout the country this November. The DSA, unlike the political status quo in much of Washington, considers housing a basic human right. Because of this, DSA wants to build publicly owned social housing, establish universal rent control, crackdown on investment properties, and guarantee legal counsel to all tenants.

These ideas cannot be shrugged off as the musings of an unserious utopian, because as we get closer to this year’s midterm elections, DSA-endorsed candidates are on the rise all over the United States. Here in Denver, for instance, Melat Kiros — a 29-year-old democratic socialist — just ousted a 30-year incumbent. If she wins this November (which seems likely, as of writing), Kiros wants to push Congress to federally subsidize about a third of all new housing developments, which would “ensure affordable, dignified housing is truly accessible,” according to her campaign’s website.

Kiros told DAME that she’s “watched friends and neighbors get priced out of neighborhoods they’ve lived in for decades. We’re short five million homes nationally, and corporate interests that fund members of Congress are profiting off that shortage. Until Congress steps up to address the supply problem, we’re going to keep watching working families get squeezed out of the communities they’ve been living in for generations.”

I asked her what can be done to tackle this behemoth of a problem. “My vision is Housing First: give people housing with no strings attached, because you can’t get clean or hold down a job without a stable place to live first. We need to build more homes, which requires real federal investment plus zoning and permitting reform to close that five-million-unit gap. And bring the people who already live in a neighborhood into the planning process.”

Even if visionaries like her gain political power this November, Kiros understands that citizens must get onboard, too. In some affluent communities, people can be combative to affordable housing projects — a phenomenon known as NIMBY, or “Not In My Backyard.”

While covering housing issues in post-pandemic Denver, I witnessed this kind of pushback from wealthy residents firsthand. Attempts to establish affordable housing — such as tiny home villages, which are usually meant to help the homeless get back on their feet – were met with skepticism from wealthier locals, who worried such projects would lower property value or increase crime.

Still, some of these ideas have managed to become reality, at least for a little while. Denver’s Monroe Village makes for a textbook example that could be implemented across the country, if only there were the political and communal will. The Monroe Village was a city-funded cluster of around 43 tiny homes, usually no bigger than a hundred square feet. Modest, of course, but a safe alternative to living on the streets. The homeless were given indoor shelter, complete with a lockable door, electricity, heat for winter, and AC for summer. There was also shared plumbing, laundry, and kitchen facilities, where the village’s staff served on-site meals.

Important to understand is that Monroe was not meant to be a place for people to live forever, but instead a way for people to get off the streets, land a job, save money, and then transition to something more permanent, ideally a one-bedroom apartment. Before the city cut its funding in summer of 2026, the project reported a substantial success rate, and is nationally regarded as proof that tiny home villages can indeed work.

But is that the solution? A part of it, yes, but on its own, no — it isn’t enough. Maybe, if we really want to solve our housing crisis, we should do something Americans don’t do enough of, which is to look outside of ourselves.

Japan, for instance, has standardized national zoning laws which make rezoning and rebuilding property straightforward and efficient. As a result, Japan has kept up an abundant supply of housing with stabilized prices, even in enormous urban centers, such as Tokyo.

There’s also Austria, which a European colleague of mine once described as the “best example of how to organize modern society.” Austria collects a 1 percent housing tax from its people, which it then combines with a designated pool of other government funds. This money is used to build and maintain socialized housing units — part of what is known as the Vienna Social Housing Model — which are kept permanently affordable and widely available to both low-income and middle class people (something that also helps to combat social segregation). About 60 percent of people in Vienna live in these affordable, high-quality housing units. Uncoincidentally and unsurprisingly, this little European country boasts very low levels of homelessness.

Then there’s Finland, which treats housing as a non-negotiable basic human right. The Finns pioneered the internationally-renowned “Housing First” model. By fronting the cost to build socialized housing for students, the disabled, and low-income people, the Finnish government has largely eliminated homelessness.

In Singapore, people pay into a mandatory state savings account, which they can access to make their down payments and mortgages. The government also carefully builds new housing to mirror national demographics, a way to avoid racial segregation.

The Netherlands caps rent prices under a home value system, known in Dutch as the woningwaarderingsstelsel. This has kept prices low enough for almost anyone to access a place to live.

Of course, none of these countries are perfect. But they do consider housing a human right, in line with the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is not a belief held in America, at least not by those at the top. Housing, to us, is a financial asset, a money-generating commodity. Home prices, rent, and availability have little to do with communal needs, dictated instead by profit motives. Single-family homes and apartment complexes are purchased by corporate landlords to generate cash and bolster investor wealth. If you can’t pay for shelter, you’re evicted and replaced with someone who can. Perhaps, as voters, we ought to change how we think about shelter. Instead of viewing it as an asset, we could join around 84 other countries and decide that basic housing is, above all, a human right. From there, we can then elect representatives who believe this, too.