Distributed for University of British Columbia Press
Legal Unhousing
Power, Rights, and Housing Precarity
Legal Unhousing exposes the often unseen ways in which legal processes work to remove people from their homes.
A growing number of people in Canada face difficulty in finding and keeping adequate, affordable accommodation. 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 that 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. It emphasizes that law can play a role in ensuring that every person has a home.
366 pages | 1 table | 6 x 9 | © 2026
Law and Legal Studies: Law and Society
Political Science: Public Policy, Urban Politics