More than 1,000 people in Rhode Island spend each night homeless, and many more families are housing insecure or make tradeoffs to basic necessities to stay sheltered. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are more than 50,000 renter households in Rhode Island whose income is less than half of what is needed to afford a standard two-bedroom rental. This disparity has created a critical shortage of 23,222 affordable and available rental homes.
Affordable and available housing is the defining challenge of our time. Without adequate shelter, staying healthy, holding a job, or keeping children in school becomes impossible. It’s why the United Nations states that housing should be treated not as a privilege earned through the market, but as a right protected by law. Families paying too much for housing, or who are housing insecure, are forced to choose between rent and groceries, between keeping the lights on and filling a prescription, between stability and survival.
Most people think that responsibility for social provisions such as housing should fall to the government, but when something is not enshrined as a right, it is only a privilege, subject to the whims of political cycles, partisan rancor, and the campaign checks of major donors. When rights are clearly stated in law, it empowers citizens to demand redress when those rights are violated and creates accountability, as citizens have the law on their side. Research shows that when rights are not codified, states do not provide them, but when codified, they do.
Over the last few years, we have conducted several studies about housing insecurity in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, asking renters about their attitudes toward housing as a human right. Results show that renters support a constitutional right to housing, and that support is strongest for a right to affordable housing and safe utilities.
We surveyed more than 1,000 renters and found that this group has strong support for many pillars of housing as a human right. Affordability stood out the most, with 81 percent of respondents saying that affordable housing should be a right. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given a recent URI survey that found that 93 percent of Rhode Islanders report that housing is too expensive, and there is broad support for the state intervening to address the affordability crisis.
Safe utilities is a close second, with 76 percent of respondents seeing it as a right, followed by 67 percent supporting privacy as a component of the right to housing. Accessibility and eviction protection were supported by 55 percent of respondents. The right to participate in housing decisions was the only pillar that was underwater, with just 45 percent support. Importantly, almost no respondents (less than 6 percent answered that none of these were rights, suggesting that framing housing as a human right is broadly popular among the renting electorate.)
The data is clear. Housing as a human right is a winning political platform. Elected officials who lean into this issue don’t just gain an electoral edge; they also gain the vocabulary to talk about what people actually care about — such as affordability, privacy, and safe living conditions. Moving the conversation toward a “rights-based” framework naturally expands public support for critical protections, from eviction defense to community-led decision-making.
During his State of the Union address in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. His core argument was that the original political rights guaranteed by the Constitution had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” and that a new framework was necessary. The bill explicitly included “the right of every family to a decent home.” Eleanor Roosevelt took this message to the international stage, serving as chair of the committee that drafted the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, signed in 1948 by the US and 49 other countries that enshrined housing as a human right.
While Congress remains deadlocked on almost all issues, the country cannot afford to wait for an even larger housing crisis to drive meaningful national reform. It is time to honor the Roosevelt legacy and uphold our commitment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by codifying the right to housing at the state level.
Skip Mark is an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz is the Saul I. Stern Professor of Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland College Park School of Public Policy.