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+Publishing an article advocating a right or entitlement to decent, affordable housing at a time of shrinking support for housing subsidies and a lesser role for public housing,1 recent congressional proposals to abolish the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),2 and widespread abandonment of essential federal ‘‘safety net’’ programs—on top of the rising incidence of poverty, widening income and wealth gaps, and intensifying racial backlash—could well be regarded as futile, quixotic, even bizarre. 1 Tens of thousands of units of public housing—vilified by then Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, in a 1996 speech before the National Association of Realtors, as the nation’s ‘‘last bastion of socialism’’ (Gugliotta 1996)—are in the process of being demolished and privatized; the private-market-directed voucher/certificate program now subsidizes more units than are in public housing projects. See Bryson (1997). 2 While HUD’s existence now appears secure, downsizing has reduced its staffing enormously, accompanied by a serious loss of technical expertise; the current HUD secretary badmouths his own agency as follows: ‘‘HUD is really a metaphor for failed government programs, for failed aspirations’’ (Dionne 1997; Havemann 1997). 224 Chester Hartman But the fact that establishing such a right does not appear to be immediately feasible in no way detracts from the argument that our society ought to embrace it. I proceed from a normative, philosophical stance that asserts the wisdom and justice of such a right, as well as our society’s clear ability to achieve it. After all, what have ‘‘rights’’ been historically in the United States if not an evolving societal sense o |