Legal Unhousing: Power, Rights, and Housing Precarity (Law and Society)

Legal Unhousing exposes the often unseen ways in which legal processes work to remove people from their homes.

A growing number of people in Canada face difficulty in finding and keeping adequate, affordable accommodation. Anna Lund and Sarah Buhler have assembled a superb group of scholars to investigate the concept of unhousing across a wide variety of legal fields: residential tenancies, human rights, municipal planning, mortgage enforcement and securitization, Aboriginal law, disability rights, prison administration, and judgment enforcement. Their findings reveal that the law can be a powerful force of expulsion and dispossession.

At the same time, contributors offer rich evidence of resistance to legal unhousing. They illuminate how creative legal practices can assert housing as a human right by emphasizing the links between a stable, satisfactory place to live and people’s well-being, dignity, and humanity. This compassionate study reinforces a fundamental shared truth: there’s no place like home. It emphasizes that law can play a role in ensuring that every person has a home.