Housing has become unmoored from its deepest purpose. As a former UN Special Rapportor on the right to housing, I’ve witnessed how “home”—a place interwoven with our identity, memories, and humanity—has been systematically transformed into mere “housing,” a financial asset stripped of human connection.

Across the world, from Seoul to Sydney, Chile to Paris, people experiencing housing precarity share a common plea: they want to be seen, to be treated as human beings. Whether in a tent, a windowless motel room, or a makeshift shelter, people create home with clotheslines, plants, framed photos—clinging to dignity despite impossible circumstances. Home isn’t just structure; it’s where we remember who we’ve always been. For Indigenous peoples, home encompasses spiritual and cultural belonging, relationships to land, water, family, and kin.

This human-home connection began fracturing in the late 1970s with neoliberalism’s rise. Governments pivoted from supporting households to courting market actors—developers received cheap loans and tax incentives while tenant protections and rent controls were gutted. By the 21st century, housing became financialized: hedge funds, private equity firms, and pension funds treat homes as tradable assets worth hundreds of trillions of dollars —more than three times the global GDP. Tenants became raw material for wealth generation. We’re no longer people living in homes; we’re assets in financial portfolios.

This creates urban warfare with real casualties: mass homelessness, housing insecurity, forced displacement. When home is dehumanized, people are dehumanized. When people count for nothing, cruel policies become thinkable—evictions into homelessness, unaffordable rents, involuntary institutionalization.

International human rights law offers a roadmap back. Adopted in 1948, it has legal authority globally and returns us to first principles: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. The right to housing attaches simply because we’re human. Profit-seeking companies undermining this right have no business in our homes.

Human rights provide concrete standards: enough affordable housing for all income levels; habitable, secure housing; evictions as exception not rule; homelessness rare and addressed. They require centering people in policy decisions and demand accountability through tribunals and courts where people can claim their rights.

Human rights aren’t aspiration—they’re infrastructure, reorienting relationships toward shared humanity so that when we see a home, it is truly that: a place to belong and be fully human.