Hot commodity or home? Housing & human rights in a financialized world
42,822 views |
Leilani Farha |
TEDxQueensU
• February 2018
Residential real estate is a multi-trillion dollar industry, the biggest business in the world; but at what cost? The financialization of housing, treating housing as a commodity and an investment opportunity, is stripping people around the world of their right to housing, to home, to community. To restore rights to people, we need a seismic shift – where the value of housing is a home, not equity, and where people, not capital, are the primary investment. Each of us needs to recognize that housing is a human right and everyone is entitled to a home.
Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing and the world’s top watchdog on housing, has set out to reignite the idea that housing is a social good not an asset or commodity. In the role since 2014, Farha has presented reports to the UN on homelessness, the connection between housing and life itself, and the treatment of housing as a commodity and its consequences for people who are poor as well as the middle class. She has traveled to India, Chile, and Portugal, among other places, to investigate whether governments are meeting their human rights obligations with respect to housing. Last year, Farha launched a new initiative called The Shift - a global movement which calls for everyone to approach housing as a human right, not a commodity.