For years a joke was told among the British media, that journalists covering housing only ever wrote two stories, headlined “House prices fall” or “House prices rise.” This is more revealing than pithy: housing is more than just a commodity, but for decades the press failed to acknowledge this. From the height of the Thatcher years until the housing crisis reached even the professional class, property as a speculative money-making tool was the sole focus of housing in the media. The concept of home, philosoph­ically, housing as a human right, homelessness and gentrification barely got a look in.

Right to Buy, the Thatcherite scheme in which municipal housing tenants could purchase the home they rented at a hefty discount, paved the way for the decimation of social housing across the United Kingdom. While newspapers told readers how to invest in “up and coming” areas, and daytime television was thronged with programs themed around home renovation (and increasing value in turn), the housing crisis in Britain slowly gained pace.

As Right to Buy ate up more and more homes, transferring social housing into the private market, few outlets reported on the fact that increasingly, families who had bought these homes were selling them off swiftly — either to make a quick profit, or because they’d overcommitted on their mortgage. Local authorities tended to be more forgiving and lenient landlords than banks, allowing people to catch up on arrears rather than instantly seizing the property. Those homes then became privately rented apartments in many cases. I’m sat in one right now, and most of my friends — young professionals in London — also live in ex-council properties, paying exorbitant sums to private landlords.