I’m not the marginal renter, and from the sounds of it neither are you, it’s the person who can barely afford rent and doesn’t have good options to chose from. The person deciding between fuel, food, medicine, or rent. The person rationing their insulin. How do you think many homeless people became homeless to begin with. They didn’t all start out as drug addicts.
And as mentioned homelessness isn’t the only option, I know plenty of people who have moved back in with family or still have room mates into their 30s and 40s.
I think I agree with you, and so I will not risk talking past each other.
Let me just take this spot to point out that from a landlord's perspective renting out two units at 100% is economically equivalent to renting out one unit at 200% while letting the other unit sits empty. However, it is strictly worse for society at large because of the artificial scarcity of a basic right.
That is a matter of ideology. The natural rights doctrine you're using to claim rights cannot have limits up to the right of someone else is mostly an artifact of Abrahamic religions and is not founded by much in the way of logic.
There is no hard reason why socially adequate housing cannot be considered a right.
I'm not part of your collective nor social contract. I do pay use taxes and fees for public goods such as roads.
When did society get the responsibility to bail out the high-paid bankers who failed in 2008/9? Occupy wall street didn't think we should bail them out.
Soft vs hard means what? More like a slippery slope until too big to fail bankers are rescued by the working class collective.
Rights are endowed by our creator (higher power or whatever your words may be). Rights are not backed by a responsibility.
What about clean drinking water? Or breathing air? Would you like Nestle to buy the rights to and bottle up all the available clean water in your area so that you can only buy it from them?
If your response is "they're not natural rights either", then maybe it's a matter of semantics, because I consider housing rights on the same level as clean drinking water.
And as mentioned homelessness isn’t the only option, I know plenty of people who have moved back in with family or still have room mates into their 30s and 40s.