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. Housing is viewed as a way to 'grow wealth and that has changed the way in which housing operates', she said. 'It means ... you have investors, private equity firms, vulture funds, buying up housing. Who is their principle concern It's their investor and if they're using housing to satisfy their investor interests, what do they have to do with that housing if it's rental housing It's obvious, they have to increase the rents.' The right to adequate housing is enshrined in Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration for Human Rights, which states that 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.' Hous