It’s difficult, after Grenfell Tower, not to find symbolism in many aspects of the built environment. Last week, a few minutes’ walk from the tower past the local fire station, I found my route to a community centre blocked by metal fencing surrounding a plush, empty new development. Taking a circuitous route through the back streets, I ended up in almost the same spot in this ghost development and was able to enter the community hall to talk to residents about the fire. There seemed to be no reason for the deliberate blocking of a public path: the road wasn’t being dug up, external building work appeared finished and there was no equipment to be seen.

Instead, public space had been casually sealed off around a moneyed, vacant development, and locals were expected to just shrug and accept the disruption. Residents rolled their eyes at the new building, aware but unsurprised that these flats were clearly never intended for ordinary Londoners: the smallest one-bedroom would relieve you of £695,000, while every poky three-bed house on the plot had already been sold for more than £2m.

The setting was remarked upon by locals, very aware that such developments function less as family homes, more as profit-spinning machines. If you’re rich enough to afford one, the aim is for the apartments to make money even as they lie empty. This development is a symptom of a broken housing system that is integral to the immediate concerns of Grenfell survivors and other residents of the area. And it is why the narrowness of the planned public inquiry into the disaster is now a real cause of worry for them.

After the fire, as details emerged about the intricacies of how the blaze progressed, the focus zoned in on such things as cladding and the provision of sprinklers. But survivors are clear that the inferno was not just a freak accident but the result of decades of neglect and poor policymaking; an indictment of how Britain houses its poorest people.

Across the UK, many others are suffering similar effects of the housing crisis. It has never been a crisis purely of supply and demand, but of shifts in legal tenure, the erosion of housing rights, the decimation of legal aid, the mass sell-off of social housing, and a growing callousness in attitudes towards vulnerable people.

For Grenfell Tower survivors, empathy was plentiful at first, as the donations and flood of volunteers rushing to west London showed. Then came the chiding calls not to politicise the tragedy, as survivors themselves stated publicly that their ordeal was political, and the snide backlash when the City of London corporation announced they had set aside 68 flats in a Kensington development for survivors.

Many reports focused on the fact that the flats were sequestered at the back of a luxury development, rather than that they were social housing built to satisfy planning rules, and that the deal functioned not as a gift to survivors but a shuffle of the housing waiting list. Residents in the opulent end of the development carped about having to live alongside social tenants and the effect it would have on their house prices. Empathy doesn’t extend as far as some people’s wallets, it seems.

Housing should be a social asset, but instead it has become a financial one. In her book Big Capital, Anna Minton states “The UN Declaration of Human Rights includes the right to adequate housing. But in the UK, housing is now, first and foremost, a financial asset, a safety deposit box for the super-rich and cash cow for growing numbers of Russian, Middle Eastern, Asian, Chinese and some British investors.”

Minton’s view is borne out by the response to calls from Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour front bench to requisition empty homes for Grenfell survivors if necessary. The apoplexy that followed this suggestion frequently referred to any seizing of empty properties as an infringement of human rights, as though being able to treat a dwelling as an asset locker was more fundamental to a functioning society than the human right to housing for someone sleeping rough each night, or burned out of their council home after a dubious refurbishment project.

But across the country, millions of people are denied the right to adequate housing. The 80 people who died in the disaster and those who escaped the fire are at the extreme of the spectrum, but currently, there are almost 120,000 children homeless or living in temporary accommodation in England. Many are living in cramped, dangerous conditions far from their original neighbourhoods, having to travel miles to get to school and yet have to continue pursuing a semblance of normality.

Meanwhile, street homelessness has more than doubled since 2010, rising each year as cuts to local authority budgets force many hostels to close or cut back beds and services. Homelessness has become increasingly visible in many cities, with figures in doorways acting as stark reminders of the social and psychological effects of a crisis that is invisible to many.

The footballer turned property developer Gary Neville admitted to the Guardian this week how difficult it was to provide the kind of help rough sleepers need – 40 of the group Neville and Ryan Giggs allowed to stay in their vacant Manchester hotel after it was squatted were rehoused, with 20 ending up back on the streets.

“They don’t want to be like this. They’re stuck. It’s a complex issue. It’s not just a case of finding somebody a home. What we found over that five months was a deeper understanding of the issues. Sometimes they want mentoring, sometimes they want cuddling.” This point and the more positive aspects of the response to the Grenfell Tower fire show the importance of human experience and needs when thinking about the housing crisis. Lives are scarred by living in poor housing, in insecure housing fearing eviction, sleeping rough, or in temporary accommodation.

And it’s happening on an unacceptable scale: the effects of the housing crisis are not short term. By neglecting the housing crisis we are subjecting vast swaths of the country to economic and psychological trauma, a trauma that it will be difficult to recover from.

Hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of long-term development issues, mental ill health and broken life chances because they have no proper homes. Thousands of people sleep rough every night, dying far younger than they should. Grenfell Tower shone a light on in the injustice of the housing crisis, and now our gaze should be broadened to all its victims.