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8.3 billion distinct rights to housing
The argument that housing isn't a normal product and shouldn't follow market rules, since people need it, runs into location. When people talk about a right to housing, they assume a quality baseline, and part of quality is where the house is. If the right is to housing of some kind rather than particular kinds of housing, Universal Basic Used RV would be fine.
Housing is an absolutely enormous asset class. It basically requires a setup where someone other than the resident pays most of the cost of building a home, because the alternative is for people to be homeless, or to live with their parents, until they've saved up enough to buy a house for cash. Appealing fixed capital whose cost is wildly front-loaded relative to the consumption it enables takes a pretty complex system and a lot of coordination to supply in the quantities people want.
How do courts enforce a right to housing?
South Africa's 1996 constitution says everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing, with the state required to take reasonable measures within its available resources. In the 2000 Grootboom case, the country's Constitutional Court held that the government's housing program had to include people in desperate need. The Court ordered the state to devise a reasonable program, and it declined to order housing for each claimant on demand.
Why does housing need so much upfront financing?
A home's cost lands almost entirely up front, while the benefit of living in it stretches over decades. Long-term loans spread the cost across those decades, which is why mortgages are the largest category of household debt in the United States, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's quarterly household debt reports.
Why does a house last longer than most goods?
Buildings are made of durable materials, and they can be repaired and renovated piece by piece, so a structure can outlast many owners. The American Housing Survey, run by the Census Bureau for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, has put the median age of US homes at around 40 years. New construction adds only roughly 1 percent to the housing stock in a typical year. Existing homes account for close to nine in ten US home sales.