Last week, a news story broke about the sheer impossibility of everyday living for millions of people all over the UK. According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly rent paid by private tenants rose by 9% in the year to February, which is the largest annual increase since records began nine years ago. The average monthly rent in England is now £1,276 and £944 in Scotland. If you are unfortunate enough to be renting from a landlord in London, your monthly outgoings may well be almost impossible: there, average monthly rents have risen by 10.6%, to a truly eye-watering £2,035. Given that the median UK monthly wage currently sits at about £2,200, the dire affordability crisis all this points to is glaringly clear.

Everything, moreover, is woven through with a very British sense of the market’s base cruelty: late last year, an investigation by the Observer found that the rents paid by tenants in the wealthiest parts of Britain had gone up by an average of 29% since 2019, whereas for people living in the most deprived areas, the figure was a mind-boggling 52%.

In our cities, skyrocketing rents are partly a subplot of the pandemic and its long tail: younger people either continued to live with their parents or moved back home during lockdowns, but are now returning to independent living en masse, thereby causing a spike in demand. At the same time, a crazy rental market and the impossibility of buying somewhere to live seem to be convincing existing tenants to stay put, meaning that supply is being choked off. The result – which is also playing out in the suburbs – is a vicious circle, exacerbated by thousands of landlords and........

© The Guardian