Eric Tars
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty
As a national organization, we at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty believe that taking a human rights approach is necessary to ending homelessness in this country. We aren’t going to generate the political will necessary until Americans actually believe and hold their government accountable to policies that we can put in place here in the richest country in the world, where we have no excuse for homelessness. We won’t make that happen until we believe that housing is a human right and hold our political leaders accountable to that. Moving in that direction, surveys have shown that three quarters of Americans in fact do agree that housing is a basic human right. But when you ask them to say what that means, they get much more vague on that. And at a political level, talking about economic rights, such as the right to housing, is much more difficult than some civil and political rights that we’re more comfortable with here in the U.S.
