Across the world, housing systems have been gradually subject to financial logics and to growth imperatives, treating homes as assets for wealth accumulation rather than as places to live in security and dignity. The financialisation of the housing market and gentrification processes have driven housing costs far beyond wage levels, generating widespread homelessness, forced evictions, overcrowding, and deepening spatial inequality — disproportionately affecting women, groups facing racial discrimination, indigenous peoples, migrants, and persons with disabilities. For people living in poverty, inadequate housing is both a cause and a consequence of exclusion, making Universal Access to Adequate Housing central to the Roadmap.
This policy profile proposes a structural reorientation of housing systems away from financialisation and growth dependency, grounded in the right to adequate housing recognised under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 11) and authoritatively interpreted in General Comment No. 4 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This requires a package of mutually reinforcing measures: the constitutional and legislative recognition of the right to adequate housing with justiciable protections; binding regulation of institutional investors, mortgage securitisation, and speculative acquisition; progressive land value and vacancy taxes; the expansion of non-market housing through public, cooperative, and community land trust models; and the decoupling of public housing finance from private financial markets. Evidence from multiple contexts demonstrates the feasibility of rights-based housing systems. Vienna’s large-scale social housing stock — covering nearly 60% of rental housing — has demonstrably stabilised rents and illustrated the market-stabilising role of strong public provision. Finland’s Housing First strategy brought the country close to eradicating homelessness before recent reversals linked to a rightward shift in domestic politics, while Barcelona’s Right to Housing Plan and community land trusts in Puerto Rico and Honduras further illustrate how rights-based governance can be operationalised at municipal level.
