Thirty-five years ago this month, the first major federal law addressing homelessness was enacted. Now known as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, it was an emergency response to what was then a new, fast-growing national crisis.
Funding primarily emergency shelters, it was supposed to be a first step, to be followed by longer-term solutions in the form of permanent housing.
Decades later, those next steps have yet to come. Meanwhile, encampments dot communities across the country. Many Americans, having lost their own homes, are sleeping on the floors or couches of friends and relatives, living in their cars, or in makeshift tents.
When millions lost their homes during the Great Depression — the last time homelessness was a large-scale crisis — then-President Roosevelt responded with the New Deal, including the creation of federal housing programs. Meant to correct the gaps left by the private market to ensure access to a safe, affordable home for all Americans, these programs funded hundreds of thousands of new housing units each year.
But in 1981, the Reagan administration came into office vowing to shrink the federal government, leading to massive cuts to the social safety net. Federal low-income housing programs took an enormous hit: In 1979, the federal government funded 347,600 new units of low-income housing; by 1983, that number was 2,630. And while funding has since increased, these massive cuts have never been restored. Today, only 1 in 4 of those poor enough to qualify for low-income housing assistance receives it.
In the private housing market, the long-standing affordable housing crisis is deepening, made worse by the pandemic and affecting more and more Americans. New construction favors luxury units that are out of reach to many, and the gap in available affordable units is now estimated at 7 million. And as private equity firms increasingly enter the housing market, housing is becoming an investment vehicle for global capital, squeezing out ordinary Americans.
But housing is a basic human right, not just a commodity for investors, and it must be treated as such. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the world community with U.S. leadership after WWII, protects basic economic and social rights, including housing, as well as civil and political rights, making clear that these rights are interdependent and that basic economic rights — like housing — are essential to a functioning democracy. As President Roosevelt also warned, “necessitous men are not free men.”
While the New Deal has been rightly criticized for its deliberate exclusion of Black Americans, Roosevelt nonetheless articulated a vision of solidarity and interdependence, emphasizing in a 1944 speech that “we cannot be content, no matter how high [the] general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people….is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.” That vision of solidarity — dealt a body blow by Reagan’s cuts to social spending and accompanying “blame the victim” narrative — has long since eroded.
Today, many Americans are not only deprived of basic economic rights — like housing — but they also struggle to exercise their civil and political rights — such as the most basic right to vote. Adding insult to injury, they also are increasingly subject to criminal penalties simply for being poor. In just one recent example, earlier this month Tennessee made it a felony to sleep on public property, even though the state has a shortage of over 125,000 units of housing affordable to extremely poor people.
Some countries include a right to housing in their constitutions; ours does not expressly do so. But after decades of advocacy, the right to housing is increasingly entering the mainstream, drawing support from the Biden White House, which has declared that “housing should be a right — not a privilege,” from U.S. senators, state legislators in Connecticut and California and from popular cultural figures such as HBO’s John Oliver.
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Bills now pending in Congress would help make that right real. The Ending Homelessness Act would expand housing vouchers so that all who are eligible receive them, the Housing is a Human Right Act would increase funds to house homeless people, stop their criminalization and protect their voting rights, and the just-introduced Rent Relief Act would create a refundable tax credit to help renters afford housing. Each would go a long way to finally ending homelessness in America.
The explosion of homelessness in the early 1980s was an early warning of the larger housing crisis that is now still unfolding. With the McKinney-Vento Act’s 35-year-old promise still unfulfilled, the need is crystal clear — and visible on streets across the country. It’s time to recognize the human right to housing here in the U.S.
Maria Foscarinis is a lawyer and founder and former executive director of the National Homelessness Law Center, and a lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School.