In telling a story, or making any point, we often rely on numbers. In argumentation, numbers lend credibility and suggest analytical precision. Numbers often speaker louder than words, because they convey important measurements and values that otherwise may not be visible to the mind’s eye.

When telling the story of housing rights violations, Habitat International Coalition’s Housing and Land Rights Network (HIC-HLRN) is responding to its Members’ call for a participatory system to measure the numbers, volume and trends of forced eviction and other forms of deprivation of the human right to adequate housing around the world. That record is found in HIC-HLRN’s Violation Database, the public resource that records the principle forms of housing rights violations and demonstrates through searchable data how grave is the deprivation that results from (1) forced evictions, as well as (2) dispossession, (3) destruction and (4) privatization of human habitat resources.

This year`s Habitat Day annual analysis of entries in the HLRN Violations Database (VDB) surveys the housing and land rights violations recorded over the past four years and focuses on four outstanding cases that reflect current trends and involve effective quantification of the material and other consequences for the affected households and communities. This report takes the reader to Syria, Palestine, India and Kenya to find the state of the art in quantifying costs, losses and damages.

Download the current HLRN report, Put a Number on It: Quantifying Costs, Losses and Damages from the Violation of Housing and Land Rights