In the current world, the right to decent housing is more than just a challenge; it is a fundamental human rights issue affecting millions of people globally. Despite legislative advancements, reality presents a daunting picture: an alarming number of individuals still live in substandard housing conditions or lack a home entirely.

Access to affordable and adequate housing has become a significant economic challenge for many families. The figures that make headlines discuss the rising cost of housing, the rental market and its regulation, the insufficient supply of public housing, the lack of emergency accommodation, the limited availability of social housing, and how young people, families, women, and migrants are systematically excluded from accessing decent housing, the number of signed mortgages and who can access them, the number of evictions and foreclosures, of illegal occupations, interest rates, and the rising cost of living. But what do these figures truly tell us? How can we make sense of them in the context of the human right to decent housing?

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Ignasi Martí is the director of the Institute for Social Innovation at ESADE, and Susanna Salvador is a researcher at the Observatory for Decent Housing of the Institute for Social Innovation at ESADE.