This much is already reassuring: residential buildings do indeed provide shelter.
But does a place of dwelling ensure that dwelling occurs?
To be a human means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. 
[D]welling has become nearly impossible;
citizens have lost the potency to imprint their lives on urban space.
They use or consume their ‘housing.’
One must be quite wealthy to be able to relocate a wall in one’s house.
We need not necessarily deplore this circumstance, but we must be willing to explore it.
Most people today do not dwell in the place where they spend their days and leave no traces in the place where they spend their nights.
They spend their days next to a telephone in an office and their nights garaged next to their cars.
Each now needs a street address with a house number (and, in some cases, an apartment number too). 
Dwelling by people is transformed into housing for people. Housing is changed from an activity into a commodity.
This transformation requires making dwelling activities impossible, so that persons become domesticated docile within shelters which they rent or buy.
Unlike the architect who constructed a palace to suit the aura of his wealthy patron, the new architect constructed shelter for a yet unidentified resident.
quotations from
Martin Heidegger, Building, Dwelling, Thinking (1951)
translated by Adam Bobeck
Ivan Illich, H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1985)
photographs from
Melbourne, Australia (2020)