> See, for example language like "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" in the US Declaration of Independence

For many thinkers in the years following the founding of the United States, precisely this language has been the fatal flaw of the “natural rights” approach. What if the world has moved on and no one can take seriously the notion that there is a Creator which has endowed men with rights? Even for the American Founding Fathers, those Deists among them were already well aware that this phrasing was a mere rhetorical flourish, it didn’t actually mean anything.

In the absence of a Creator who endowed men with rights, we can only view "rights" as a convenient fiction that humankind, as a social animal, proposes for mutual benefit. And in that case, a representative democracy’s decision to see housing as a human right is pretty straightforward.