UN Geneva - Multimedia Newsroom : HRC – Press conference: Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us at this press conference.

Our speaker today is Mr Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.

He will brief you today on his report to the Human Rights Council towards a just approach to the global housing crisis and migrants.

This is just a brief reminder that the press conference is embargoed until the Special Rapporteur makes his presentation to the Human Rights Council.

We will begin with opening remarks by the Special Rapporteur and then move on to questions.

Mrs Special Rapporteur, you have the floor.

[Other language spoken]

I'm glad to be here to speak about migration and the housing crisis.

Undoubtedly there is a sense, of course that is shared widely in especially in all the rich and middle income countries, that housing is increasingly difficult to obtain because of global affordability crisis.

Housing is insecure, there are large number of force evictions, discrimination is rife, and the additional challenges posed by increasing conflict and climate change also impose higher risks of people either to lose their homes or find it difficult to obtain new housing when that actually happens.

These are issues that are extremely valid and that is indeed a global housing crisis.

There are multiple dimensions of this crisis, including affordability, climate change, and conflict, all of which are issues on which I have recently submitted separate reports.

But while housing, of course, is a major global crisis right now, it is being spun and spoken out in a manner that actually misdiagnoses its causes and specifically aims at targeting individuals who have very little to do with causing the housing crisis.

And that is what we see, especially in many countries in the Global North during election campaigns and recently concluded elections, that politicians are finding it too easy to blame migrants for their domestically grown housing crisis and they seek to take radical measures.

Some of these measures are already underway, which include mass detention and mass deportation of migrants, militarisation of borders in order to defeat what they think is a serious ****** to many things in their countries, including, of course, housing.

The connection between migration and housing, in fact, is repeatedly something that you see in country after country.

So what I do in this report is to ask some hard questions about whether there is in in fact migration crisis.

Is it true that more and more numbers of people are crossing borders and ending up in countries, particularly in the global North?

And secondly, if there is no ground to actually substantially and factually establish that there is a migration crisis, then why are we seeing this exploitation of the migration crisis to blame them as the root cause of housing crisis?

So in other words, the second question is, well, who exactly benefits from this connection between this manufactured crisis about migration and the actual reality of the housing crisis, which is real?

So in my report I actually take on centrally this narrative that the housing crisis that is experienced by countries around the world, particularly in the global N, is somehow unique and that it is unprecedented.

The facts simply don't bear it out.

Migration flows since the mid 60s have remained more or less stable.

That includes the larger number of refugees, for example, from particular conflicts, who have crossed borders.

The the term migrants it, when it is used by me in this report, includes not only economic or labour migrants or those who are crossing borders for education purposes, but also refugees and asylum seekers are victims of human trafficking as well.

The root causes of the housing crisis that countries have are decades old.

Usually they go to wrong policy decisions taken over a course of decades, including embrace of neoliberal policies, the complete abandonment of a commitment to social housing and the inability to protect the rights of those who are in need of housing, including renters, and the failure to control the large number of evictions that are besetting country after country.

The condition of migrants, on the other hand, when they do cross borders, when they end up in other countries, is quite dire.

If anything, the condition of migrants shows that they are victims rather than the causes of housing crisis in other countries.

They usually have insecure housing.

They are in shelter conditions, temporary shelter conditions which are beneath the basic minimum standards.

They are often living in camps or other settlements that are very long lasting.

Can be creating conditions of protracted stays as non citizens without any rights including the basic right to for example, move around freedom of movement.

In many countries migrants also suffer from lack of access to and discrimination in accessing housing market, including access to social housing or access to private markets.

Landlords usually end up discriminating, discriminating against migrants quite quite easily without any consequence, including vast differences in the rents that are charged or abusive conditions that are imposed on renters and so on.

So basically the picture that I paint in the report is that migrants are in fact victims of this very same housing crisis that affects people at large in all the other countries that actually allege that migration is the route of the crisis.

Now, housing crisis is real, but the way to address it is not by finding some false causes.

And here migration is not the cause of the housing crisis.

That is basically the message of the report.

And I hope that rather than coming up with a with a false narrative about the connection between migration and housing, countries would actually resolve to tackle the root causes of the housing crisis as well as migration.

Which includes a commitment to a multilateral approach to dealing with migration.

A commitment to reversing decades of wrong policies and create institutions and legal protections to ensure that housing is protected as a human right for all, including non citizens, no matter what their status is.

Because that's in fact what international human rights law requires countries to do.

So with that, I hope to I'm happy to get any questions to have a dialogue.

[Other language spoken]

I've just asked that you state your name and your organisation before asking a question of the special effort.

Thank you, Antonio.

[Other language spoken]

Very much I am Antonio.

Boto from Spanish news agency.

[Other language spoken]

So you basically said that migrants are not.

The root.

Causes of the house crisis.

I would like to know then, which do you think are the root causes of this housing crisis?

[Other language spoken]

Visited Netherlands in late 2023, an official country visit that special rapporteurs conduct, and after that I submitted a report to the Human Rights Council on that.

On my findings of the visit, the Netherlands government submitted its response and we had a dialogue of the Human Rights Council.

All these documents are public now, and what I found in Netherlands very much applies to many other European countries, as well as other OECD countries in the global N that many of the root causes of the housing crisis that they're facing, particularly a severe shortage of housing, the inability of even working families to be able to afford housing.

The very sharp increase in the price of rent, the lack of sufficient investment in public housing, as well as the poor quality of the housing that actually exists.

The very **** rate of evictions that we see that are enabled and facilitated by the legal system.

These are all common features of many countries.

Housing crisis and the root cause of these crisis go to policy decisions that were taken decades ago that embrace, for example, housing as a commodity.

To think about housing purely in market terms, but not to think about housing as a human right, which actually LED over the course of several decades, starting from the 80s to a gradual abandonment of funding and support for social housing.

The privatisation of social housing by selling them off to private providers.

The entry of large scale financial firms into investment in housing and land as financial assets, A phenomenon that is broadly referred to as financialization of housing, which the Human Rights Council has taken note of and expressed concerns about.

We also have very large private firms, equity investors who are in the market investing in housing as purely as commodities, creating this whole condition of housing without dwellers.

We have a lot, We have a whole range of housing and apartments that are owned by investors but that are staying empty.

Vacant housing is a real problem and a phenomenon, especially we see it in wealthier countries where a large investing class is creating these these issues.

Finally, I would also say that that is unfortunately a very weak legal recognition of the right to adequate housing, even in countries that think that they have a legacy of protecting housing as an important social good.

Now, protecting housing as a social good is not the same thing as protecting housing as a human right.

It is not legally protected if it is not sufficiently guaranteed in their constitution or other laws.

But more importantly, that these guarantees are not accessible by most of the people in those countries through legal or other enforceable mechanisms.

That is unfortunately, for example, what I found in Netherlands, where the constitutional provision on housing, for example, is not really in conformity with the meaning of right adequate housing under international law.

The courts in Netherlands are not accessible and do not rule on guarantees of right to housing.

This is a massive, massive gap, and so legal protection is a foundation on which policy changes that abandoned the mistaken policies of the past have to proceed.

So I hope that answers the question.

Thank you, Nina from AP.

Hi, thank you for taking my question and thank you for the briefing.

I was wondering if you're talking about how how this issue of, you know, housing crisis has been portrayed as a, as a migrant crisis.

Are you saying that that is being done intentionally?

Could you say something about how it's being, if it is being weaponized and if you have examples of that from specific countries?

I mean, you mentioned the Netherlands.

I don't know if you have other countries that you could raise some examples of how this is being portrayed.

[Other language spoken]

Yes, unfortunately we see migrants being blamed for the housing crisis in many countries.

We see that in other European countries as well, the presence of migrants is particularly connected with the housing policy and the approach to housing renovation and rebuilding.

There is an ongoing case, in fact involving Denmark, whether I filed an amicus petition at the Constitutional Court of Denmark, and that has now been referred to the European Court of Justice, which will soon rule on the question of whether housing policies can specifically target neighbourhoods that are occupied by migrants that are racially and nationally different from the minor, from the majorities in those countries in a way that demonises them.

That is basically the question in that case in about whether such measures constitute direct discrimination under European law as well as international law.

We also have very concerning developments in the United States where elections have been conducted by blaming migrants for the housing crisis, which is very acute and very real in the case of many American cities.

And unfortunately, very regressive policies and measures are being proposed, including mass detention and expulsion of migrants and repurposing illegal facilities such as Guantanamo Bay for holding of migrants, creating temporary arrangements for holding migrants.

These are all very concerning developments, but we also see the rise of anti foreigner, anti migrant rhetoric which is contributing to hate crimes and to a climate of fear and anxiety on the part of all migrants, including those who are legally in these countries.

Because basically the strategy here is to blame foreigners, all foreigners, no matter whether you are regular or irregular for a crisis which is entirely homegrown.

And that is a very unfortunate development and has very potentially dangerous implications if we don't arrest this soon enough.

Antonio.

[Other language spoken]

Well, in my country Spain, who is also affected by this housing crisis is one of the main words in society.

Some voices say that it's this crisis is partly due to the fact that not enough is being built because of the too many regulations.

And also some people say that developers are not encouraged to build because the business is less profitable that it was a few years ago.

So I want to know if you agree with this diagnosis.

Well, every country's situation is unique and it'll be hard for me to comment specifically about the situation in Spain without further direct study and engagement.

But it is true that many countries find it very difficult to build more housing, and the question is why?

Why is it that countries struggle to build more housing?

Well, as with many of these complex issues, there are of course several reasons.

But one major reason which is often overlooked, which I point out in my report on the affordable housing crisis last year, is the lack of sufficiently available land for the construction of housing.

Land constitutes almost 70% of the development of new housing.

It's a very expensive item and as long as a properly prepared land is available for developmental housing, the cost of housing, then it's not as much of A mountain to climb in order to build new housing.

So we find, for example, in countries where states or cities have more of a control over land, including by preventing speculative land investments, that is, land markets that are purely functioning as tools for making profits for investors.

In fact, local governments are able to build more housing more easily.

Shortage is not an issue.

We see that, for example, in the case of Singapore or in certain European States and cities including Vienna, and all the adoption of institutional models that enable housing to be to be produced socially but not through the market.

So social institution for production housing are nonprofit based collective organisations that are legitimised by the state who can actually obtain, for example, subsidies, subsidies or other forms of concessional financing from the state in order to build housing that is accessible to lower income groups.

We find that in some European cities as well.

Bologna has experience with Co housing models, for example, in Italy.

So there are models out there.

None of them are, shall we say, functioning at the scale of national levels.

So they're not the dominant models, but there are very promising local models that we can look at and learn from and perhaps find solutions.

Surely these are possible instead of basically looking at the issue as one of structural crisis that we cannot resolve because we don't know what the answers are.

[Other language spoken]

Sorry, I wanted to follow up on on your the answer to my previous question.

I was hoping to go back to the situation in the United States that you mentioned.

And the United States obviously is perhaps the foremost country for commodification.

So I was wondering if you could say a little bit more about about how that has has played out there.

And then also, I mean, you mentioned Guantanamo.

There's also, there was also the case of the Haitian migrants.

That were being blamed for for everything I guess in one, one town recently.

Could you I don't know if you could say just a little bit more about how how this is being used and also about, you know, the specifics of the the housing market in the US and how that that compares?

[Other language spoken]

It's it's, it's actually well known that most of the refugees who enter the United States have actually have to go through an extremely rigorous vetting process.

And the number of refugees who are actually admitted is not very large at all.

And there are placement programmes that decide which particular states within the United States actually would receive how many refugees.

So it's a highly well planned effort coordinated by the federal government.

So the idea that there is a very large refugee flow that somehow creates a housing crisis is actually a very inaccurate one because #1 the numbers of refugees coming in are not such as to cause any kind of housing crisis structurally.

And secondly, the areas which are chosen for settlement of refugees are chosen after a great deal of consideration by a national policy process.

So it is the responsibilities really on the government to ensure that the settlement does not disrupt the access to housing or other essential services by the host communities.

Now when refugee flows happen in an unanticipated manner in very large numbers, in context where your neighbouring country produces a large number of outflow refugees and they end up in your country, then sometimes the large inflow refugees can indeed create a negative impact on access to housing by host communities.

We have seen that with the Syrian refugee crisis.

To give an example of very large number of refugee flows into neighbouring countries including Turkey and Jordan, the rents in the neighbouring towns where the Syrian refugees entered did go up briefly.

So there is a short term impact when very large number of people enter a country.

But in the United States, the conditions of entry are not like that are all, neither the refugees nor illegal migrants who enter because of authorization from the government or such in large numbers that they can really impact on housing market as a whole.

The root cause of the housing shortage and access to affordable housing in the United States comes from the lack of ability to build enough accessible affordable housing in the United States.

And this is a decades old problem.

[Other language spoken]

It wasn't because the migrant flows have increased suddenly.

[Other language spoken]

And the lack of access to sufficient land by local governments is a dire problem.

The role played by zoning laws and by land use laws that control the availability of land for housing development is actually extremely important.

Those laws and those zoning laws actually prevent the availability of sufficiently affordable access to land because so much of land in cities are, for example, zoned for single family use.

So there are all these structural factors and I would really suggest that it's a total misdirection when something as old and as deep as a housing crisis is sought to be somehow pinned on the entry of migrants, which is also factually not true either.

So it is a misdirection built on a falsehood.

So I think that we need to abandon that.

[Other language spoken]

Are there any other questions for the special rapper?

If there are no other questions, we will then close this press conference today with a reminder that it is embargoed again until the special reporter presents his report to the Council, which will be either tomorrow afternoon or Friday morning, and we will let you know.

Thank you so much for joining us and for the interest in the work of the Special Rapporteur today.

HRC – Press conference: Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing - 05 March 2025