The Birth of the Right to Housing: Housing Policy in Early Twentieth Century Britain and the British Empire

Abstract

This Article explores the development of the idea of a right to housing that took place during and in the aftermath of the First World War in Great Britain. A combination of existing poor conditions, the need to ensure productive workers, a desire to minimize workers’ resistance, and some degree of progressive sentiment led to the development of ambitious public housing plans during the war. While these plans were highly contentious, the postwar decades saw bold new public housing ideas converted into law, leading to the production of hundreds of thousands of public housing units in Britain. While nothing on the same scale took place around the British Empire, the idea that the state should intervene far more extensively in support of the adequate provision of housing advanced substantially in the period there as well—and prominently so in Bombay, Hong Kong, and Singapore. While the idea of a right to housing was not enshrined in law in this period, these developments provided essential groundwork for that obligation, as well as for subsequent public housing policy developments around the world.