Legal Unhousing exposes the often unseen ways in which legal processes across various fields work to remove people from their homes. A growing number of people in Canada face difficulty in finding and keeping adequate, affordable accommodation, and their experience of housing loss and displacement can have profound effects. 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 how the law adjudicates competing claims for a place that is someone's home and justifies ensuing displacements, demonstrating how 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.
Legal Unhousing : Power, Rights, and Housing Precarity