FictionThatMatters.org

Is housing a human right? Most definitely. Housing has served as a primary driver of the U.S. economy for over a decade, yet funding for government supported housing has plummeted. Human rights require that housing be treated as a social good and not just a market commodity. Protections in housing are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Art. 25), the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (Art. 11), and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Art. 5).

In the U.S., less than 3 percent of housing is public housing — and even those meager facilities are under threat. The economic crisis is also pushing more people into homelessness.

Eric Tars is the Director of Human Rights at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. He is considered by his peers to be one of the foremost human rights activists working within the United States today. He’s on the front lines of the battle to realize housing as a human right.

FTM: Tell us about what your work and how you came to be doing it.

Tars: I’m the Human Rights Director and the Children and Youth Staff Attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. I came to work on homelessness and housing issues mostly through my work in trying to bring a human rights approach to domestic policy advocacy but it’s a very appropriate place for me given my background and my passions. My father was a refugee following World War II and lived in refugee camps until he was about seven years old in Germany. He’s Estonian. Growing up, I always had a sense that when I saw refugee populations on TV that I couldn’t just turn it off and say ‘those people aren’t important’. I always had a sense that those were families who, like mine, did not choose to be in that situation and were going through some of the most difficult and stressful times that one could imagine. Given the advantages of being born in this country and having access to the kind of education that I’ve had, I’ve always felt like I needed to be doing something to help.

FTM: Can you tell us a little bit more about the history of Estonia. How did your parents and grandparents come to be refugees?

Tars: During World II, Germany first attacked Estonia on its way to try to defeat the Russians. My grandfather fought in the Estonian army and was captured by the Germans and forced into the German army. The Russians stopped the German army at Moscow and were pushing back towards Berlin. My grandfather sent my grandmother — who was then 8 months pregnant with my father — to refugee camps in what was part of Germany and what is now part of Poland. That’s when my father was born and somehow between November 1944 and April 1945, my grandmother made it with her children and her sister across all of Germany into the British sector by April of 1945 when the war finished. They ended up in refugee camps in northwestern Germany until my dad was about 7 years old.

FTM: Homelessness, poverty, and housing are not what people immediately think of when talking about human rights.

Tars: In terms of human rights issues, I really do think of homeless persons in the U.S. as being internal refugees, people who are fleeing economic hardships, not necessarily war, but the conditions that they face in many cases are similar to conditions that face refugee populations. Part of the connection to the work that I’m trying to share is the sense that, similar to refugee populations, these are people who did not choose to be in this situation.

I really do think of homeless persons in the U.S. as being internal refugees, people who are fleeing economic hardships, not necessarily war, but the conditions that they face in many cases are similar to conditions that face refugee populations. Part of the connection to the work that I’m trying to share is the sense that, similar to refugee populations, these are people who did not choose to be in this situation.

Families have to think about how they are going to feed their children every day. They have to sleep with their children in a car, in a tent, or just out on the street, and there is no harder thing for a family to have to go through. Really, we need to create a sense of humanity and empathy for people in that situation and help people understand that basic human dignity means that no person should have to experience that. It’s the government’s obligation to ensure that people have housing in the richest country in the world, where we have the resources to end and prevent homelessness. We have to generate a sense that the government is obligated to put those resources in place.

FTM: Housing as a human right — some people might think of it as a socialist project, an area where the government shouldn’t be involved.

Tars: I’d push back a little bit there and say that recent polling with U.S. audiences suggests that if you ask people about basic human rights they will say that housing and health care are human rights by a significant majority.

FTM: There’s a distinction between shelter and housing. Housing is more permanent and can help people get on their feet while shelters require you to pack up your bags every day and do it all over again. Can you speak to that?

Tars: A lot of the difficulties lie there. We would say that emergency shelter is one component of ensuring the right to housing but it’s definitely not the end point. I think Americans do have a strong sense of personal responsibility that does conflict with government providing housing for everybody. The right to housing does not necessarily mean that the government has to build housing for everyone and provide it free of charge. The right to housing means a variety of measures, including public housing and vouchers, but also market regulations so that people aren’t taken advantage of by predatory lenders, things like rent control that ensures affordable housing, or zoning regulations that ensure adequate amounts of affordable housing are actually being built. All of those are steps that the government can take to ensure the right to housing for everybody. It will take all of those elements for the right to housing to be made real.

FTM: One of things that sparked off this conversation was not just your own family history, but also your passion for literature and other media as having inspired you in your work. Can you speak about that? Do you thing that creative stories can actually make a difference in terms of activism?

Tars: I was reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Adichie, which really resonated with me in terms of speaking to the refugee experience that my father had had. He’d never really talked about the difficulties on a day-to-day basis of growing up in a refugee camp. He remembered being hungry from time to time and children in school harassing him for speaking differently than everybody else. Reading Half of a Yellow Sun emphasized the day to day struggles of people who are fleeing from war and trying to make do on a daily basis with whatever resources they have. It made me think that if everybody were forced to read a book like this it would create a lot more empathy for people in war situations and might in the long run cause more hesitancy in going into war. We have a lot of stories about the soldiers in war and heroes and the mythology of ‘just wars’. If we had more literature that captured the suffering of war it might over the long term create a culture where that kind of action would be less acceptable.

Reading Half of a Yellow Sun emphasized the day to day struggles of people who are fleeing from war and trying to make do on a daily basis with whatever resources they have. It made me think that if everybody were forced to read a book like this it would create a lot more empathy for people in war situations and might in the long run cause more hesitancy in going into war. We have a lot of stories about the soldiers in war and heroes and the mythology of ‘just wars’. If we had more literature that captured the suffering of war it might over the long term create a culture where that kind of action would be less acceptable.

FTM: Digging a little deeper into this point, what do you think distinguishes a book like Half of a Yellow Sun from a Tom Clancy story? Are there specific things about the quality of the writing that move you?

Tars: Tom Clancy and other war novelists write about the excitement of being a soldier, but the human suffering that results from any of the actions that are taken is often not directly dealt with by the author. Some of this comes out of a colonialist legacy where war for the colonial power is portrayed as the just and right thing to do. As we get more literature coming out of post-colonial societies and minority groups, that balance will start to shift and we’ll have a greater awareness of those issues.

FTM: Are there any other stories that you’d like to talk about?

Tars: I’ll make a big leap here. I recently read the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Hadden, a story about an autistic child and his adventures. It stems from very simple facts. It gets inside this child’s head and brings the reader to a very different place. It shows how things that we perceive in one way can be perceived in a different way by a person with what people would call a mental disability. But I see it as a different ability and a different way of seeing the world. As we develop as a society with more access to literature from post-colonial societies, racial minorities, disabled groups — non-majority constituencies — that will help us be more sensitive to the needs of people in those situations.

FTM: How can people help with issues such as homelessness and housing? What is the best thing to do when you meet or see someone suffering on the street?

In terms of what people can do, it depends on your capacity. Things like volunteering in shelters and soup kitchens are important as an entry point for being in contact and understanding the real needs of people. Tutoring a homeless child, working to secure housing resources for an individual, working on larger areas of housing policy — people have to become part of a movement where we say that homelessness is not acceptable in this country.

–Deji Olukotun