On 30 March 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) adopted a resolution on the human rights of persons in street situations without a vote, marking the first standalone HRC resolution addressing homelessness. This arrives less than two years after the United States Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2023) authorised the criminalisation of homelessness, and as over 220 laws penalising unhoused persons have been passed across American states. Beyond the familiar contradiction between international norms and domestic retreat lies a deeper analytical problem: the shift from homelessness to persons in street situations represents not linguistic evolution but doctrinal retreat that, examined alongside the resolution’s substantive silences, reveals how international human rights law manages the contradiction between housing as a human right and housing as a financialised commodity.