I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.
There’s no force involved, it’s a potential principle of self-organisation.
That means it's not a human right. If your government is engaging in real human rights violations you don't say things like, "potentially maybe we might want to reconsider how we organize our society."
One example of a human rights violation would be, the government makes up for a shortfall in their black budget by engaging in human trafficking. Whatever the solution to that - keep the dictator, change the dictator, give the president a second term; that's all situational, what's not is that you have to quit doing it.
>“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled.
Essentially, the problem is, that's not what it means. A human right is a value that you are willing to see your civilization stop existing if that's what it takes to preserve it. If you made housing that high of a priority things would quit working pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you gave public trials to criminals who were willing to surrender, things would go pretty well.
The people building houses are working because they are paid and they prefer that to the existing social safety net.
If you are allowed to say, "our budget isn't adding up today so some people will have to stay on the wait list a bit longer," you aren't acting like it's a human right. Human rights are maximum priorities, not just high priorities.
An example of a reasonable human right would be that your own government can't kill you without a fair public trial. If a country ended up in a situation where they had to assassinate a businessman to keep their budget balanced, it would be reasonable to say "forget about the budget, you can't just take one of your own citizens out." However, if you had to loosen up the housing program because your tax revenue came in low that year, doing so would be potentially a reasonable option. "Potentially a reasonable option" is not even remotely on the table for human rights violations, which is why housing can't be a human right.
Housing could be a right in that sense: the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing. Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests like ensuring that the housing is safe.
The most pragmatic objection to this would be that everything you do prevents the construction of housing - if you build a city hall, you are preventing an apartment block from being built on the same land. Taxes prevent the construction of housing because the reduce the funds available to home builders and buyers. Property rights prevent the construction of housing because they would prevent me from setting up a tent in your front lawn. Making housing a right is a wellspring of endless absurdities, unless you are willing to treat it as a "maybe" goal. Maybe-goals and human rights are disjoint sets.
>Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests...
So, let's look at a real human rights example, being assassinated by your government because you are protesting something. The dictator might claim that they were balancing your life against reasonable government interests - the reasonable response would be, "no interest is so reasonable that what you did would be justified." That's the thesis of human rights, if anything is justifiable then you don't believe in human rights. It's not that complicated.
So, if you think that housing as a basic human right can be suspended for reasonable reasons, you either don't really think it's a human right, don't believe in human rights at all, or are proposing a distorted crazyland.
Life: people die every day in the US. In some cases, the government even kills them!
Liberty: We put people in jail
Speech: Incitement to riot; slander
Press: Libel; national security
Religion: If your religion includes e.g. human sacrifice you certainly won't be free to practice it.
And so forth.
Providing housing most of the time is just a program. Providing housing all of the time with no exceptions, like you would expect from a human right, involves some serious distortions of other values. That's the problem, people are using the word human right when they mean high priority. It's a high priority that I do my laundry, but if society were organized so that I did my laundry at all costs, if we were all convinced that a society where I did not do my laundry did not deserve to exist, then things would get pretty crazy.
This isn't some paperclip maximalization requirement you adhere to the social contract, and under the wrong conditions will force people into house-building labor camps. Human rights are how you reason about resource allocation. You have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers, but that obviously doesn't mean a judge must preside over your case that same day by threat of force. We can recognize physical realities, while still understanding that if we wanted to, we could provide a social safety net that includes a place to sleep.
> If your country ran out of money, if the builders all started working for foreign companies
If your country runs out of money, many human rights are probably in danger.
Either way, I always avoid phrasing things as positive rights. But they can usually be rephrased as “I believe it would be in the interest of our society and the well being of our people to provide housing for all people.”
Because it will.
Nobody's asking for government funds to build housing in SF. Developers are lining up to build housing funded entirely out of their own pockets. People who are pro-housing generally just want to government to stop preventing people from building more high density housing on property they already own.
So, if you're arguing some sort of taxes and government regulation are bad thing, you should be in favor of drastically more housing in SF.