It takes a certain type of man to stand at a high-rise window and glory in the city that he has crushed under his sharp-booted foot. That man is a psychopath, and he is buying flats in central London, apparently.

For those of you who haven’t had the soul-sucking pleasure of watching the latest advert from housing developer Redrow London (which has since been removed from the web), allow me to explain. The advert, which is shot in the style of American Psycho crossed with Scarface, shows the selfish, insomniac, heartless rise of the archetypal City boy.

He sits in a red-lit chair staring hungrily at dancing thighs, he screams at his girlfriend, he barely sleeps, he slicks back his gelled hair and shakes the congratulatory hand of his grey-suited bosses. He sacrifices health, love, self-respect and friends. He is consumed by a grandiose sense of self-worth (the voiceover claims he has “made the impossible possible”) and a predatory need to win, and he uses his glib and superficial charm to snog someone in a lift.

And all so, one day, he can live in a luxury apartment, presumably in east London. After all, it is Tower Hamlets where Redrow owns a huge apartment block, and which, according to the council’s website, has the highest rate of child poverty and is the second most deprived borough in London.

What is so awful about the advert – aside from the meaningless voiceover intoning that “they say nothing comes easy” and that you have to strive “to be more than individual” – is what it says about how the housing crisis is viewed by those on either side of the breadline. Namely, that 14 storeys above the breadline, you don’t notice the housing crisis at all. Even when, as a new report from Shelter points out, 60% of people are struggling to meet their housing costs and bailiffs repossessed more than 11,000 rented properties between July and September.

Of course, there’s nothing new about the indifference of the wealthy to the suffering of the poorly housed. Back in 1937 George Orwell wrote that “housing shortage” is a “phrase that has been bandied about pretty freely since the war, but it means very little to anyone with an income of more than £10 a week, or even £5 a week for that matter … But in the industrial areas the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty.”

While Redrow’s hero strides past his spot-lit breakfast bar, his shelves of trophies, his godawful art prints and his faux Don Draper whisky decanters, people just a few streets away suffer what Orwell identified as the “rotting floors and cracking walls … skinflint landlords and blackmailing agents” that characterise our housing crisis today as much as then.

Redrow is, you may recall, the company that installed so-called “poor doors” in its Tower Hamlets tower. Because, while it’s one thing to look down at an economically deprived community – or, to quote the advert’s narrator, “to stand with the world at your feet” – it’s quite another to have them sharing your lobby. The protagonist of this film may suffer the fetid indecency of a crowded tube, but only briefly, and only in order to “rise and rise” to his eventual, luxury life.

Last week I visited a street in Toxteth, Liverpool, where residents were invited to buy one of the small, neat, redbrick houses for just £1. It was a cold day in that nothing stretch between Christmas and New Year, but even then Cairns Street was tapping and hammering to the sound of builders renovating once empty homes. New windows, a street market, planting beds and newly painted gates all seem to indicate that this sort of scheme may be a way to plug the gap between abandoned, derelict properties and a crippling lack of affordable housing. But while a similar project, funded by the government’s Empty Homes Programme was introduced in Stoke-on-Trent, it is a mere drop in the ocean of what Paul Mason described as a “system geared to building high-rise apartments for the Russian mafia and rich footballers to speculate on”.

Of course, it’s simplistic to blame one property developer for a national crisis. Redrow isn’t the only reason that 44% of residents in Tower Hamlets are living in income poverty; and Redrow isn’t the only reason that much of London is sliding back to an Orwellian state of economic polarity and social deprivation. But then again, as the advert says, all the Redrow hero really dreams of is “to look out at the city that could have swallowed you whole, and say, ‘I did this’.”