Goals can be avoided or punted. By calling housing a "right", we elevate it as an imperative, not just something to be shrugged off. It is explicitly the purp

Goals can be avoided or punted. By calling housing a "right", we elevate it as an imperative, not just something to be shrugged off. It is explicitly the purpose to make the issue more difficult to avoid. It is a game of semantics, sure, but so is the distinction between positive and negative rights. People are still obligated to act to uphold your negative rights as well, through law enforcement and court proceedings. But they are not compelled by force - those are voluntary jobs just like everything else, and they are paid for their service by the government (or taxpayers). The same would be true for housing. Property is bought by the government (or built at its expense), and the humans involved in making that happen are compensated as well. The costs for this will be added to our taxes (as are the costs for roads, courts, and everything else that makes our society liveable). Of course, that is contingent on people actually paying a fair amount in taxes. Most people who support housing as a human right are also in favor of closing tax loopholes and raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy. Morally speaking, your access to the resources required to sustain life should not be dictated by how useful you can make yourself to someone richer than you. We no longer live in a world where the production of every person's needs necessitates the active participation of every person. World hunger for example is no longer a supply problem, it's a distribution problem. We now have machines and automation capable of extracting and producing all human needs with relatively very little human effort. We can power them through renewable energy sources far more productive than human labor. In fact, there is so much automation that workers are becoming displaced by machines and cannot find meaningful ways to contribute (some may be retrained as machine operators/maintainers, but as dictated by capitalism, they will always be far fewer than the amount of workers displaced). We are in, or on the cusp of, a post-scarcity society (for physical needs), and the systems that manage the production and distribution of resources must be rethought. The only reason that scarcity still exists in this marketplace is because the owners of those systems still demand obscene profits so that they can go on joyrides in space. The actual costs of maintaining the systems would be much lower if the end goal wasn't quarterly growth. I've focused on food here, but the situation for housing can be similar. Additionally, housing and real estate are seen as investments that should grow in value over time, which leads to perverse incentives and pressures that are not inherent to solving the actual problem of housing people, and which drive prices far higher than the actual costs a government would need to take on.