Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Al Jazeera post, UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha discusses homelessness, human rights and why the lack of adequate housing is on the rise.

• There's often a focus on homelessness in the U.S., but we can't forget that nearly 900 million people are living in "informal settlements" around the world. What can organizations do to address forced evictions and overdevelopment?

• Here's more on what we can do about youth homelessness.

Despite an uneven global economic recovery since the 2008 financial crisis, adequate and affordable housing is increasingly out of reach to hundreds of millions of people, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Leilani Farha.

In her latest report on global housing need, Farha wrote that the world's money markets have priced people out of cities, with speculators and investors treating housing as a "place to park capital".

Farha, who presented her findings before the Human Rights Council in Geneva in March 2017, said that "housing has lost its social function and is seen instead as a vehicle for wealth and asset growth. It has become a financial commodity, robbed of its connection to community, dignity and the idea of home."

Leilani Farha spoke to Al Jazeera about the growing global housing crisis and the steep challenges ahead for the more than one billion people who do not have adequate housing.

At an estimated global net worth of $163 trillion, the residential real estate market is equivalent to more than twice the world's total economy and dwarfs the approximate seven-trillion-dollar-value of all the gold ever mined, Farha told Al Jazeera.

Read the full article about the roots of the global housing crisis at aljazeera.com.