In countries without constitutional protections, sure. But in the US taking away people's inalienable rights, for example to free speech, is nearly impossible.

I agree in principal but unfortunately in practice the playbook for denying rights is pretty tried and true.

a)

Quietly pass an obviously unconstitutional law (or better yet, a series of smaller laws that work together), don't enforce it too much against powerful or sympathetic people/groups and then do so for a decade until the court gets around to telling you to stop at which point you tweak the law just enough that you can lie and say it's different and reset the clock.

b)

Pass a law that lets you deny some right to "obviously bad people" (e.g. felons, people who beat their wives, addicts, etc) then quietly expand the scope of "obviously bad people" to include many normal people.

And if you give everyone housing you would still have to use force to take away that housing and especially from so many people, the same way you would have to use force to take away free speech.

All you have to do is pit one group as more deserving than another and let them fight it out. You also let them deteriorate like the Soviet housing blocks (not that the tenants didn’t try to do upkeep, but infrastructural aspects).

This would take a while. What I am trying to say though is that action and inaction are not so different really. There are plenty of things government has to actively do and enforce to make sure that any basic rights are honored. You can take away free speech by simply stop policing and defending your people. Meaning free speech will not be so free as someone might kill you for what you are saying.

Decision whether something should be made a right should not be based on whether it can be labelled as passive or active, but whether it will benefit the society.

If making housing a right overall increases average life quality and makes unproductive lives productive it should be done. People here can disagree or agree whether the people who will get that housing will male something of their life, and this is something that we have to experiment with in order to find out.

Also if you believe that of the government and that government can not inherently be improved there is not much to do anyway.