Far from home
Today’s housing systems exclude the young and vulnerable, says former UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha. She tells journalist Nicholas Wroe that it will take a radical shift to treat housing as a human right, not a privilege
Summary
Former UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha argues that today’s housing systems fail the young and vulnerable – eroding democracy. She traces how financialisation has turned homes into commodities, benefiting investors while displacing tenants. Now leading The Shift, an international housing rights organisation, Farha calls for governments to uphold housing as a legal right, not a privilege. While the challenges are profound, she points to grassroots projects worldwide as evidence that more just, humane housing systems are possible.
Main image: Keeping It Together: acrylic painting on paper (2009)
“The housing world we have created for young people is so unjust,” announces Leilani Farha. “For some, it starts from the minute they want to leave home. For many others, it starts a long time before that.”
Farha’s stark assessment comes from decades spent documenting housing failures across the globe, and her analysis goes far beyond individual inconvenience, or even acute hardship, to explain how housing insecurity threatens the foundations of democratic participation and social connection.
Farha says she has been “meditating” on what is lost when we lose the security of housing. “And it is so much. Of course, there is the practical loss of shelter and so on, which is obviously and publicly catastrophic. But there are also so many psychosocial aspects to it that play out in every sphere of life that we maybe don’t see so clearly, but have equally profound and negative impacts.”
Putting down roots
Farha’s trenchant stance on housing and democracy stems from remarkably varied experience of grassroots advocacy, international diplomacy, legal expertise and bearing witness to housing’s importance to human dignity across six continents.
Born in Ottawa in 1968 to Lebanese-Canadian parents, Farha’s route to becoming one of the world’s foremost housing rights advocates took her through an English literature degree at the University of Toronto before pursuing an unusual combined law and social work degree. This intersection of legal frameworks and human systems would become a key feature of her work.
During her time at law school in the mid-1990s, Farha was surprised to discover that students could undertake human rights internships in many locations (including Israel), but none had ever gone to Palestine. “The politics of Palestine were at our dinner table when I was growing up,” she explains. “Our family lost land in the 1948 Nakba. So I knew there was something not right about that, and I was determined to go to Palestine.”
She had picked a momentous moment. In 1994, Yasser Arafat was returning from exile, Palestinian prisoners were being freed and the Oslo peace accords were signed. Farha ended up working with former prisoners, most of whom were previously students themselves, at the Palestinian Human Rights Information Center. “Palestinians had really centred their arguments on civil and political rights and together we learned about the human right to housing, which was relatively new. It provided a legal framework under international law for people not only to have a home, but also to have the right not to have it demolished, to be evicted and displaced. It really opened my eyes.”
On returning to Canada to finish her law degree, Farha completed her articles with an international housing NGO. She continued to work in the sector, at a grassroots human rights organisation focused on housing which provided her with a crucial grounding in practical advocacy, connecting abstract legal principles to lived experiences of discrimination and displacement. Farha’s reputation for effective administration allied to innovative legal activism that embraced human rights saw her become a leading figure in the field, and she was appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur in 2014, a position she held until 2020.
“When young people cannot establish stable housing… they become disconnected from the civic life that underpins democratic participation”
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Housing for the few
The expansion of Farha’s role at the UN, from local housing advocate to a worldwide authority, was reflected in her and her team’s ambitious effort “to follow the money” in housing across the globe. Their research estimated that, in late 2017, the global value of residential real estate was $220trn – a staggering sum that, since the 2008 financial crisis, says Farha “has nothing to do with housing” but instead reflects the interests of finance through the creation of an interconnected “ecosystem of governments, banks, investors and central banks”. According to Farha the process also encourages national banks to reward “bad behaviour from a human rights point of view”, offering lower interest rates to investors who acquire buildings where rents are likely to be raised to satisfy lending conditions and profitability, which often results in tenants being displaced. Governments often then support these investors through public programmes and funds that mirror bank risk assessments. And, in parallel, housing can become a place to hide (sometimes illicit) capital which can then provide security for trading financial instruments on global markets.
“We were seeing people living on sidewalks in the most affluent countries in the world, and new mortgage-based housing systems in the Global South. Our minds were kind of blown by this as a predictor in a financialised system – the very system that was being imposed on Southern countries. Financial vehicles for generating returns rather than providing shelter. Now, everyone talks about financialisation and commodification, but back then we really felt we were in new terrain.”
Farha points out that it is the most vulnerable who suffer in this system, “people of low income and from racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, single parents, women, refugees and migrants, to name just a few.” The young are also disproportionately affected – and when young people cannot establish stable housing, she says, they become disconnected from the civic life that underpins democratic participation. “They don’t engage because they can’t. There is too much going on, too many moving parts.”
Other consequences of this shift not exclusive to the young but which also certainly impact them are more health issues (including, not surprisingly, mental health issues) and diminished creativity, economic activity, business innovation and much more. “On one level, the fact that someone can’t host their friends at home doesn’t seem so serious, but it is part of a wider loss of connection. If you can’t do that you likely also can’t engage in local or national issues, or make the long-term investments in a place that democracy requires.”
A matter of rights
While at the UN, Farha began the work that, in 2019, would establish The Shift, an organisation that challenges global financialisation to treat housing as a human right, not a commodity or an extractive industry. Much of the organisation’s time is spent trying to persuade local and national governments and decision makers to leverage as much social value from housing finance as possible. Farha says governments should ask “Am I getting public value for public dollars?” and they should ensure that any public subsidies or tax benefits to investors result in keeping people housed and secure.
But how does this approach fare in a world in which the philosophy of ‘might is right’ seems to be in the ascendancy?
“What has been on display, certainly recently in the most flagrant of ways, is a complete disregard for the universality of human rights,” Farha acknowledges. “‘Might is right’ has infected housing policy, where those with capital can displace those without, regardless of human rights obligations and no government at any level anywhere is doing enough.” She also draws explicit connections between local housing injustices and international failures: “If we don’t understand that what’s happening in housing with respect to rights is the same lack of universality of human rights playing out in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere, then we’re missing something fundamental.”
But there are also examples of hope at the grassroots level. She cites her work judging the World Habitat Awards, where she has encountered an inspiringly diverse variety of projects from all over the world. A female construction training project in rural Tanzania, for example, that provides eco-friendly and dignified homes for the elderly while promoting gender equality, poverty reduction and low carbon construction. Or, in Beirut, amid near economic collapse, a safe and secure database for people to report housing rights violations.
And as for human rights, she points to their enshrinement in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly in the form of the Universal Declaration. “Human rights aren’t just something quaint. They are law. And there are standards that flow from that in housing, as in everything else. And so, if you’re in the business of housing, you must abide by those laws and standards. Equally, governments should ensure that these rights are upheld: that housing is adequate, affordable, secure.”
Farha recently revisited the Universal Declaration, she says, finding renewed purpose in its vision of the human family.
“Even after all these years, that really moved me. I do want to live in a world where I’m part of something called the human family. So I go back to what my former UN colleague and friend and head of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, once said. Of course we can criticise the international system and international law, but what is Plan B? There is no Plan B. I cannot agree with her more.”
Nicholas Wroe is a freelance writer and former Assistant Editor of Guardian Review.
Amy Casey’s paintings of cities explore the work and organisation that goes into their creation and evolution; the constant shifting and adaptions and layers of changes. She is currently a resident artist at Zygote Press in Cleveland.
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