Right to Housing, Capacities of the Subject and Conventions of Legality

In the era of the Anthropocene, both evictions and migrations as well as the conditions of the real estate market endanger the right to housing. The exercise of this right is threatened from all sides, even in European social states where homeless people proliferate and where a serious crisis of access to real estate ownership is raging. It calls for the coordination of a sociological perspective on its implementation with a reformulation of the bases of the universal right to housing from the point of view of a theory of justice.

In Social States, the right to housing has been constitutionalized. Different mechanisms allow people to access the right. However, this right is very indeterminate. It is therefore the subject of an iterative interpretation that allows legal intermediaries to define it in multiple implementation mechanisms: Courts, tribunals, negotiations and political pressure, real estate agencies, individualized mediations. In a recent sociological inquiry in Belgium, we identified three conventions of legality allowing the implementation of rights. These conventions build not justice, but daily legality.

This sociological description of the legal implementation of rights cannot suffice to account for the evaluation from the point of view of justice. On the normative level, the question is that of the conception of the subject of law on the one hand, of housing on the other. From the perspective of the Capability Approach, housing appears as a resource or as a factor of conversion. A home is a condition for becoming capable of being oneself and acting freely in the world. A fundamental moral right, it takes the place of the right to property in Kant’s legal philosophy : it consists of having a place to live in the world.