Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this month that the “financialisation of housing” is one of the greatest challenges facing the right to housing to date. A lawyer from Canada, Farha argues that the housing sector has been transformed by global financial actors and unprecedented amounts of excess capital.

“It is no longer as we once knew it. Housing has been financialised: valued as a commodity, rather than a human dwelling, it has become for investors a means to secure and accumulate wealth rather than a place to live in dignity, to raise a family, and thrive within a community.”

“Housing has lost its currency as a human right,” she said in a statement.

And the impact of a commodified housing market – where residential real estate is now valued at USD 163 trillion or more than twice the world’s GDP – is devastating, she warns. Informal settlements are razed to create space for luxury developments, communities are devoid of human life as investment properties sit empty, and what she calls “hedge cities” like Stockholm, Sydney and Vancouver have seen prices soar by 50 per cent or more in just five years, pushing low and moderate income people out of cities.

Farha is calling for concrete policy responses to protect the right to adequate housing as a human right in order to meet the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. These include halting foreclosure proceedings, mandating affordable housing as part of all new housing developments, and reinvesting property tax revenues into affordable housing,

But more than that, she wants to see a different vision or relationship between state and investor, she said in an interview with Citiscope: “At every government level, we need to see a shift in this relationship and a reclaiming of their authority to put human rights as the paramount interest, not the interest of investors as paramount.”