Dead money. A mantra drummed into impressionable minds by well-meaning family and friends from a very young age. It's dead money, renting; dead money. I recall this ingrained and familiar refrain from my adolescence in stoic, parsimonious Preston, Lancashire; still it echoes in my early 30s now living and working in Liverpool.

My name is Matthew. I'm an architect – and a tenant. I've shared a house with friends for about a decade, enjoying – or enduring – the fruits of the private rental housing market.

I moved to Liverpool to study at 20 and renting a place was a natural entry into independent living. But handing over money for something that you will never own – awful, no? Tolerable for a few years following education while you save a deposit, but unthinkable in the long term, surely? The desire to own property is so embedded in the national psyche that it fosters the insecurity inherent in any other form of tenure; would not the rental market be better supplied and serviced if it weren't seen as a second-class option?

How then to adjust when there can be little doubt that property ownership has become more remote from many people my age, especially those without assistance in some form from family, even here in the north-west, where prices are not at the London level. What's becoming clear is that inheritance is becoming the prerequisite to property ownership.

We're left with a situation where you need to save forever, or so it seems; property prices continue to rise while salaries stagnate, hardly circumstances to facilitate saving. Or else you turn to investment from the "bank of Mum and Dad". But many of us are "unfortunate" in that our families are not wealthy enough for that.

It seems galling that they ought to provide not only the means of education, but also our place in the great property-owning democracy.

Have we abandoned the idea that successive generations might prosper and enjoy greater standards of living than their parents? If we place such importance as a country on the culture of property ownership, we are fostering inequality if this is reserved only for those who "inherit" (or, as is more often the case, receive before any parental death).

Government schemes that provide loans for deposits rely on a supply of new housing, which on any estimate is far from forthcoming. We seem to have abandoned the idea that the provision of housing should be subject to anything other than the prescriptions of the market. And the market quite inevitably is interested in serving opportunities for profit, with, importantly, the least possible risk.

This means large segments of the population, those with a definite need for housing but who can't access a mortgage, are poorly served. Instead, the market is geared towards those with the greatest means, but often least need, and all in the service of profit. The very definition of a structurally dysfunctional system.

It's hard to comprehend that on the same day I can read that we have a dramatic shortage of housing, apparently requiring the construction of some hundreds of thousands of dwellings a year, and also read that a celebratory demolition of hundreds of homes – the Red Road flats – will form the centrepiece of the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Perhaps these are very much the "wrong" sort of houses, in the "wrong" sort of place. After all, they are high-rise and might even be built of such a terrible thing as concrete (a typical synonym for decay and malaise). Now, it seems, a home must be a commodity, and a desirable one at that. If home ownership really is a tenet of modern Britain, we need radically to reassess our current situation. Increasing the supply of housing will help more people have access to home ownership, but this will take years and is far from straightforward, given the complexities of planning and often the resistance of communities to new development.

Although here in Liverpool we can accommodate some measure of population expansion, the same can't be said of other parts of the country.

Perhaps we need to accept renting as a way of life, to build better and much more for this purpose, and to raise standards in the private rental market to match the more professionalised commercial property sector. We need to begin the conversation in which we liberate the word tenant from any shame, liberate it from the notion of dead money.

A better-served rental market should provide more affordable rents, assisting those who can and wish to do so to save for that all-important deposit. There doesn't seem any great appetite for this kind of debate at government level, despite the high-profile campaigns of organisations such as Shelter. Instead, the recent pension reforms announced in the budget would seem to increase the likelihood of a buy-to-let trend among retirees, further exacerbating the housing supply problem without any forthcoming solution. In the north-west, we don't perhaps have the additional burden of overseas investment feeding a price boom as in London, but we certainly have a shortage of affordable housing and at best early signs of recovery in the housebuilding sector.

Can we think differently about housing after the cultural shift embodied by the council house sell-off in the 1980s? If we treat property only as a commodity – call it a pension, investment or what you will – we're left with a market hardly open to all.

From where I'm standing, it doesn't feel as if – to coin a phrase – we have a right to buy.

Matthew Ashton is a chartered architect living and working in Liverpool