When I moved from the suburbs to London proper at the age of 21, the first flat I looked at promised a garden, which was odd, because it was in a tower block. It turned out, on closer inspection, to be an area of rooftop tarmac surrounded by a wire fence, beyond which stood a car park.

The next place we looked at, my friend Rachel asked the lettings agent if the area was safe for a woman at night. “Round here?” he snorted, cheerily. “Nah.”

Pretty much every Londoner too young to qualify for a free NHS health check will have their share of rental horror stories. The flat where the ceiling lamp doubled as a water feature. The mysterious curtain in the kitchen that turned out, when pulled back, to be hiding the shower.

Once upon a time, this was sort of fine, because there were decent places out there if you kept looking, and your early 20s felt like an extension of student life and, anyway, it wasn’t for ever. Increasingly, though, these horror stories aren’t the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god anecdotes you recount over a bottle of wine at the kitchen table of the actually habitable place you end up with. They’re in the mainstream of the London housing market, they now cost a bomb, and you probably can’t complain about it at the kitchen table, because there isn’t a table, instead there’s a camp bed and there’s someone paying £600 a month to sleep in it, so you can’t get to the fridge. More to the point, with house prices being what they are, there’s a fairly good chance it is for ever, actually.

The government may have shown no interest in improving the lot of renters, but luckily for them, the private sector has. The Collective promises to be a “new kind of property company”, and its website pitches it as a cross between a Silicon Valley startup, a worker’s soviet and the Polyphonic Spree. “As the UK’s first and the world’s largest co-living provider,” it tells us, eyes fixed on the horizon of a bright new dawn, “we create innovative living and working spaces for the creative and ambitious.” What this means in practice is that you get a room in a student hall of residence for grownups overlooking Willesden Junction freight yard.

There are many things about all this that are anger-making, but the first that leaps out at you is the price. The rooms are going for the low, low price of £1,083 a month, or almost exactly half of the average Londoner’s take-home pay. And for that, remember, you don’t get a house or even a flat. You get a room that’s about three metres square, which is fine if you’re a sulky teenager but not great if you’re 30; as well as a bathroom, and a two-ring kitchen hob you share with a neighbour.

Sleeping in a ‘twodio’. Photograph: Amandine Alexandra/The Collective

You do get access to communal spaces such as bookable dining rooms, a library and a games room, just to really play up the “still living in halls” vibe, as well as a roof garden (great if you like trains). And bills – Wi-Fi, electricity, cleaning – are thrown in. But it’s still pretty steep for what is, as I may have mentioned, a room.

This might just about be fine, if the Collective’s 550-bed tower was somewhere either convenient or fashionable, but as it stands it’s neither. The talk of co-working spaces and so on brings to mind those awful hotel bars in Shoreditch, packed with people pretending to run the next Facebook from behind their laptops. But the new block is over in Old Oak Common, in the gap between a major railway junction and Wormwood Scrubs. It’s apparently well-placed for the arrival of Crossrail, but that isn’t arriving until 2019, so in the meantime you’re paying £1,100 a month to live in a post-industrial wasteland on the outer edge of zone two.

Oh, and just in case you weren’t feeling inspired to violent revolution yet, the Collective brands its rooms “twodios” – like studios, but for two people (albeit people who really, really like each other). That alone is enough to make you wonder whether Marx may have had a point.

But perhaps the most rage-inducing thing about the Collective is – it’ll probably work. Yes, it’s replacing independent living with an ongoing studenthood, a sort of perma-lescence. Yes, it’s yet another sign that neither government nor market are going to take any of the radical steps required to actually address the housing crisis or improve the lot of renters, and that both state and private sector are content to offer the next generation a few crumbs for the table.

But with the rental market as it is, people will probably stump up anyway, paying through the nose for less space and less independence. They’ll probably think themselves lucky. At least there isn’t water dripping from the light fittings.