Item — HN Reader

“For housing attorneys and a former squatter we spoke with, companies like Jacobs’ are symptoms of a dysfunctional system where property is treated as a profit-producing commodity instead of a shelter a person is entitled to.”

As a red stater, I really can’t understand the last statement. If someone is in a bad spot, there are numerous ways some shelter can be offered. The homeless person may have to put up with some shelter rules ( or maybe friend or relatives rules ), but shelter is available.

To say someone is entitled to shelter in someone else’s house just isn’t credible to me.

1 comments

I think it's an attempt to normalize the idea that shelter is a basic human right. As a blue-stater, I'm undecided on whether I agree that it's a right, but I definitely think that nobody has a right to shelter in any property they choose.

It's a pretty complicated issue, and the legal patchwork of state versus county versus city laws can make it really difficult to untangle. I think that given the system we have, everyone in it is pretty much behaving rationally, if in their own best interests. I understand why the squatters would choose a squat over a shelter.

> As a blue-stater, I'm undecided on whether I agree that it's a right, but I definitely think that nobody has a right to shelter in any property they choose.

Given that all the property is claimed, I don’t see what the distinction is. If there existed a ton of unclaimed coastal California property, there wouldn’t be a problem.

So the more interesting and actionable question then is who has the right to live in coastal California?

None of the rights that people have are unrestricted in that way. The sixth amendment gives you the right to a lawyer paid for by the government, but it doesn't give you the right to pick any lawyer you choose.

The obvious answer is that, if people do have the right to shelter, it is the state / county / city's obligation to make some form of shelter available. And I get that there are "shelters" available, but from what I understand they are effectively not available to a vast number of unhoused people far a wide variety of reasons. Failure to maintain appropriate shelters is effective a constructive refusal.

I liked the concept of the tiny home villages that LA experimented with, but it looks like they did a poor job, or cost cutting got too severe, and ultimately they fell short.

What if the government paid for shelter in the middle of Oklahoma?

I don’t know.

If people are “entitled” to shelter, shouldn’t they be entitled to food, even more so? In that case, if a hungry person were to knock on your door and demand something from your pantry, how could they be denied?

The concept of 'positive rights' (i.e. rights that are not just that the state doesn't do something to you, but affirmative rights to something happening) has a long history, and such rights are affirmed by treaties ratified by every member of the United Nations - so the existence of such rights is broadly accepted on an international scale.

Article 25 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Huma...) declares: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control".

UDHR is mostly aspirational - it is just a declaration with no enforcement mechanism (although there are a whole series of more binding treaties on specific issues under UDHR). The existence of UDHR does reveal what the international consensus is.

However, it is worth mentioning that positive rights are nominally obligations on the state - i.e. if people's positive rights aren't being met, it is a failure of the state in the same way as if the state infringes on their negative rights. It does not imply that every private individual needs to arbitrarily solve those failures as in your example.

So to answer your original question, according to widely accepted declarations of human rights, people are entitled to live in a society where they have the opportunity to obtain food and shelter (people who are able can be made to work for that food and shelter, but still have a right to food and shelter if they are disabled or unemployed for reasons outside their control).