Right to Housing
Housing is the place of refuge that people need to protect, shelter from inclement weather, preserve their privacy and, in most cases, represents the place of settlement not only of individuals but of households, basic structures the social body. It is a basic human need like food.
Various international instruments recognize the right to housing, such as Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its Article 11 says “… the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including food, clothing and housing … “is also listed among the Rights of the Child (Article 27 of the Convention) in Article 5 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (art. 14).
Recommendation 115 of the International Labour Organization on the housing of workers and their families moving within the community urged member states not to discriminate against foreign workers in the provision of housing by granting those considered normal there.
The United Nations conferences have been implemented on this topic, such as Habitat I, in 1976 which was held in Vancouver (Canada) where they called on states to arbitrate urgent solutions to the housing problem. In 1996 he repeated the experience with Habitat II, this time based in Istanbul, where he pleaded to housing as a fundamental human right recognized the important role of NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) with a big role in solving the problem.
Almost all people have housing as a place to live (although many live in the street, at grave risk) so far assumed that the majority of people have decent housing. This right is enshrined in the Constitution of Argentina, between social rights embodied in the reform of 1957, by Article 14 bis, but still an unfulfilled desire, rather than a guaranteed right. This impossibility of having a home owned or rented, goes hand in hand with poverty, which in turn is closely related to the lack of work or precarious work. Argentina has approximately 3,000,000 of properties that are considered unworthy.
What is not worth living? According to the National Institute of Statistics and Census of Argentina (INDEC) are poor housing in rural areas, ranches, with thatched roofs, dirt floors and mud walls and metal boxes in the cities, the slums and tenements, where no shelter of privacy, and shared for example, between family bathrooms, and mobile homes, and live in trailers or railroad cars.
The emergency villas settled on public lands is a serious social problem, since in addition to working families, mixed people living outside the law.
To talk of decent housing, houses in addition to being material, they must have the minimum sanitary conditions for preserving the health of its inhabitants, such as water supply or sewerage service.
Many people own the building but not the land where houses have been built because the cost of land have been built on public land, or where the owners were absent, in these cases, many of the same homes are usurped by these homeless people.
Another serious problem of housing shortage is overcrowding, the INDEC considered critical when more than three people share a room inside the house.
In Argentina, as in most countries, the problem began to worsen with the development of industrialization, which resulted in a great migration to the cities, where there was greater industrial concentration and presumably higher labor demand. So they began to settle, so irregular, families of unemployed workers or aspiring to work in areas close to the factories, in deplorable conditions.