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- Title
PROGRESSIVE PROPERTY THEORY AND THE WICKED PROBLEM OF HOMELESSNESS: THE CASE FOR A NATIONAL RIGHT TO SHELTER.
- Authors
BERTULIS-FERNANDES, JONATHAN
- Abstract
The United States is experiencing an unparalleled affordable housing and homelessness crisis, and at least 580,000 people are forced to live unhoused each year. Despite this crisis, no federal law has established a right to shelter and the Supreme Court has not yet recognized a constitutional right to housing. In the absence of a national right, various forms of a right to shelter have emerged in individual jurisdictions across the United States. These right to housing alternatives have ranged from the all-encompassing right to shelter that has existed in New York City since 1979 to the more limited right to shelter regimes existing in Washington, D.C. and Massachusetts. Similarly, the Ninth Circuit's 2018 decision in Martin v. City of Boise provides the potential contours for a right to shelter built on Eighth Amendment jurisprudence. The growing national homelessness and affordable housing crisis demands bold action--the property system in the United States must be reoriented if it is to remain fit for purpose. This Note explores the development of right to shelter regimes through the lens of Resilient Property Theory (RPT) and conceptualizes the homelessness crisis as a wicked property problem: a large-scale and existential threat to the resilience of the state and vulnerable members of society rooted in the property system. This Note argues that the emergence of individual jurisdictional rights to shelter are part of various state responses to the increasingly wicked property problem of homelessness that simultaneously allocate resilience to individuals experiencing homelessness. Finally, this Note calls for a national right to shelter, arguing that individual jurisdictional rights to shelter provide an example of a progressive property approach to rights realization that actualizes a potential framework for a future national right to shelter.
- Subjects
UNITED States; HOMELESSNESS; HOMELESS shelters; RIGHT to housing; ACTIONS &; defenses (Law)
- Publication
Boston College Law Review, 2023, Vol 64, Issue 7, p1681
- ISSN
0161-6587
- Publication type
Article