Legal Unhousing: Power, Rights, and Housing Precarity

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 contributions 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 safe, adequate, and affordable housing and people's well-being, dignity, and humanity. There's no place like home; this compassionate study reinforces that the law has a role to play in ensuring that everyone has one.