This is an incredibly common argument from right-libertarians: asserting a positive right to basic needs, like housing, as an intolerable intrusion on someone else’s liberty. Let’s unpack.

1/ https://twitter.com/dapf/status/1367547248847040513

What do libertarians mean when they’re critical of housing as a “right”? To paraphrase: everything in our society is privatized & allocated via voluntary exchange in markets.

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Asserting a positive claim to housing, then, is to assert the right of the house-less to the property of someone else (land, infrastructure, labor) outside of a voluntary exchange. It would be coercively redistributive.

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This, of course, takes for granted our system of private property and market allocation as a transhistorical, organic default. It *is* this way, therefore it *must have always been and always be* this way.

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The problem with this is, of course, that for most of human history, it wasn’t this way at all. Pre-capitalism, there were three very broad categories of accessing housing (I’m generalizing like mad but bear with me):

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First, people could construct their own housing, using their own labor and soliciting voluntary labor from their communities, on common land.

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Consider this description of voluntary communal labor to construct & maintain personal housing on common land on Tristan da Cunha (about which I plan to write considerably more later):

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1525/aa.1970.72.6.02a00050

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Second, people could live in communal dwellings with extended families: the medieval hall, the Pueblo, Çatalhöyük.

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The concept of providing housing for people was so central to the Haudenosaunee people that their name for themselves literally means “people of the longhouse.”

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Third, people could receive housing as part of a subordinate labor relationship, as in the case of feudal serfdom...

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...or, more broadly, servant contracts. Unlike modern wage labor, which exclusively trades abstract units of labor for regular wages, with no further obligation, servants historically sold *loyal service* in exchange for provision, security, etc.

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From David Graeber (naturally):

https://renegadeinc.com/the-wage-labour-system-is-based-on-slavery-laws-we-should-can-it/

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You can see this in the way George Washington constructed contracts with free servants: they were to live on his estate, enjoy the amenities thereof, receive pay, and, in return, do their best to achieve goals like “grow more crops, if possible.”

13/ https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/02-07-02-0088

Also this one. They’re a bit of a slog to read through, but you get the sense that servants were incorporated into Washington’s “household” in a sort of feudal sense, with mutual obligation rather than an alienating exchange of pure labor.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-14-02-0377

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All of this to say: pre-capitalism, no one would have thought of housing as a “right” so much as a simple fact of life. If you lived in a community—which all people did—the community housed you in some manner.

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If you lived in a family, your family housed you. If you worked for a boss, your boss housed you. If you lived on commons, you housed yourself.

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Involuntary homelessness in the presence of housing was as historically unthinkable as watching your neighbor’s house burn and doing *nothing* to help—theoretically conceivable, with no institutional mechanism to enforce, but sociopathicaly unthinkable.

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It’s hard to understate this. Our very word for “economy” derives from the Greek “oeconomia,” or “household management.” Our very concept of economics, of participating in society, is derived from this notion.

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Our very concept of “homelessness” has its roots in Tudor England, when enclosure—privatization of common land and the expulsion of entire villages—produced a massive army of tens of thousands of “vagrants”.

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In a classic proto-capitalist move, the Tudor monarchy didn’t try to protect the rights of the dispossessed, but rather criminalized them, a coercive move to force people into wage relations and a new “housing market.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagabonds_Act_1530

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So, before capitalism, asserting a positive “right” to housing would have been to assert a positive right to a community, or a family, or to work. Which is to say, you know, being a human being.

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Consider a comparable situation: the privatization of toilets and criminalization of publicly relieving oneself. (The public health benefits of the latter are a tangential byproduct, in the same way that zoning laws can tangentially produce public benefits.)

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A person might asset a “right to urinate,” which is to say, a right to perform a basic human function without paying someone. A libertarian will insist this violates the property rights of the toilet owner.

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They do this because they refuse to acknowledge that the *property owner* has coercively interposed themselves into the situation. A toilet can be built on common land or made free to use by anyone—indeed, public sanitation is one of the basic hallmarks of “civilization.”

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Privatization is the establishment of a toll booth on common property, staffed by a toll collector (the “owner”) and an armed guard (“the state”). Asserting a positive right to housing is to assert the freedom to access the common property without paying the toll.

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