[sethd]

It’s funny that you use quotes around “right” when referring to property rights, which are well established as natural rights. All while making the claim that adequate housing is some kind of fundamental human right. It might be a government benefit in some places, but it’s hardly a human right.

If housing is a right, then it would make more sense to list the things that are not human rights. What else, Diet Coke delivered daily? Maybe a new car?

[ajhurliman]

That one always blows my mind when people drop “housing is a human right”. So everyone has an inalienable right to the property and labor of another person? What if you were in John Locke’s state of nature and you were not participating in any social contract, would you still have that right?

[agalunar]

But all rights are made up – they're simply things that we think are really important to provide each other. I can only assume that when a person says "housing is a human right", they mean "housing is something important enough that I think we should guarantee access to it".

If someone says something that seems ridiculous, but they're speaking seriously, sincerely, or about a matter they've given some thought, then there might be a chance you're simply misunderstanding them.

Tangentially: "an inalienable right to the property and labor of another person" is not that ridiculous of an idea. You already have a right to the labor of other people in nearly every society on earth. If the people where you live pay taxes, and even if you didn't avail yourself of public roads and whatnot, you still enjoy having a court system and law enforcement to uphold your rights, you enjoy a military to defend your country, you may enjoy the stability of a currency, and so on, and (if you are a native citizen) you get all of this merely for having been born. [And people don't get to opt out – people have to pay taxes even if they want to live alone in the wilderness, and to be relieved of that burden, in the United States we have to pay a fee to renounce our citizenship, even assuming we have the means to emigrate.] If you think at only a slightly larger scale, you might view us all as being stuck on Earth together and all members of a global society, unable to avoid participating to at least some degree.

[To be clear, I personally don't like the idea of owing anyone anything, especially when I presumably didn't choose to be born, but life is inherently unfair to begin with and also very difficult, so I can understand someone arguing that it's worth giving up the fight for a particular fairness in exchange for a better life overall. Also, other people may not have the same notions of fairness as me; I can imagine someone arguing that guaranteed access to housing makes the world more fair.]

I'd agree that it would be ridiculous to claim housing is a "natural right" as opposed to a potential "legal right", since it's a contradiction almost definitionally. Although not everyone agrees that natural rights exist, or what they are precisely.

[agalunar]

All rights are made up, of course – nature grants us nothing, we grant ourselves rights. That said, it's hard for me to tell if you're not reacting in bad faith. Every person needs a place to live,† but they obviously don't need diet Coke and they usually don't need more than one place to live.

† You'll die without sleep, you'll die from exposure to the cold, you'll catch disease or be unable to hold a job if you don't bathe or clean yourself, you'll suffer from serious mental illness if you've not a space that's reasonably safe and secure some fraction of the time, and so on.

[schwartzworld]

Of course it's a right. I don't agree with the gp that owning 2 homes is fundamentally immoral, but no human deserves to be homeless.