While many Londoners will profess to be scandalized by these policies, few can claim that they have punished the culprits at the ballot box. Fewer still can claim to have campaigned, marched or written to their local member of Parliament. Dissent, for most of us, seldom amounts to more than signing an online petition over the proposed closing of our local pub. A city whose residents often maintain that mixed communities are a source of civic pride has tacitly accepted a new urban landscape that is demonstrably callous and insane. Why?

Resignation is at least part of the reason. London’s prostration before market forces has happened so fast as to feel irresistible. But there are also motives that are more self-serving. Britain’s austerity narratives have long relied for their spread on the demonization of those most dependent on the state, and London, for all its hallowed diversity, is not immune.

Much of this cold-heartedness has its root in the runaway cost of property. The largely unacknowledged, if obvious, subtext to London’s metamorphosis is that the forces degrading our poorer neighbors are intertwined with those that have seen the value of people’s homes soar. By accepting the trope that paints public-housing tenants as feckless, we have acquiesced to their abuse and found justification for our own greed.

That was before we awoke to see a tower block engulfed in flames.

Listen to conversations in London today and you will hear fewer renters voicing resentment at the perceived free ride of public-housing tenants, fewer owners clinking glasses over their capital gains. In newspaper columns, and on social media, the usual right-wing apologias — the incantations about self-reliance and trickle-down economics — have temporarily fallen silent. In a letter to The Guardian, soon after the Grenfell fire, one nearby resident described a 100 pound (about $130) rebate handed out to council taxpayers in 2014 as “guilt money.” It is a sentiment that many Londoners, not least my banker friend, have cause to share.

It remains too early to say whether this ambient regret will translate into a greater popular will to forestall the city’s course. But if there was ever an indelible image to wake a city from its coma, it’s there staring down at you when you get off the Tube at Latimer Road station — the tower of the unwanted, London’s shame.