The 'Right to Housing' for Homeless People

FEANTSA has a longstanding commitment to ‘a rights-based’ approach to tackling homelessness, and this commitment is shared by many working in the homelessness field. Rights-based approaches are intuitively appealing, promising radical solutions to complex issues of housing need and social exclusion. But what precisely do we mean by rights-based approaches,
and do they deliver the things we expect them to in practice? This chapter
considers the relevance of the centuries-old debate about the existence or
otherwise of the ‘natural rights’ of human beings, before moving on to consider
the applicability of universal ‘human rights’ in the housing and homelessness
field. Within the national realm, ‘programmatic’ citizenship rights, as well as
positive legal rights that are ‘enforceable’ by individual citizens in domestic
courts, are critically scrutinised with respect to their efficacy in tackling homelessness. The chapter concludes that, while the notion of rights as ‘absolute’
can sometimes tend to close down debate, it is crucial to maintain a critical
perspective on rights discourses within the homelessness field on both philosophical and pragmatic grounds