The UK’s dysfunctional housing market – or more accurately, markets – is a problem affecting people of all ages. But the plight of millennials, born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, deserves special attention. These people, now in their 20s and 30s, are far less likely than previous cohorts to be able to access a socially rented home or afford to buy one – particularly in London, Edinburgh, Oxford or any of the country’s other hotspots. Those who went to university, particularly since 2010 when tuition fees rose to £9,000 annually, have large debts. This week a parliamentary report said a chronic lack of affordable housing means that 630,000 of them are on course for an old age of homelessness.

How to turn this situation around and enable millennials to achieve a good standard of living – including secure housing tenure and the freedom this brings – is a question that should exercise not just policymakers but voters. A good society should strive for intergenerational fairness as a matter of principle, but also because we depend on younger people to look after us when we grow old. For this arrangement to break down, because earlier generations have failed to share opportunities and resources with those coming up behind them, would be deeply harmful.

Housing is not the only area of public policy with a generational aspect. But the huge rise in the number of private renters (from 2.8m households in 2007 to 4.5m in 2017), combined with the fact that 25-34s constitute more than a third of them, makes it an important one. Even for the 3.9m households whose landlords are either councils or housing associations, and who are less exposed to rent increases as a result, rising prices have served to widen the gap in status and resources between the have-properties and the have-nots. The so-called boom in house prices since the mid-1990s has not only widened existing inequalities but created new ones. The government’s help-to-buy scheme made things worse, not better. That doesn’t mean young adults without rich parents don’t deserve a chance to get on to the first rung of the housing ladder. They do.

But home-ownership is not the be-all and end-all, and promoting it must not distract from other priorities. Even our regulation-averse government has belatedly recognised that problems in the private rental sector can no longer be ignored, and launched a consultation on abolishing no-fault evictions. This week’s report from the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, goes much further, with its call for a register of landlords and a private rent commission to control rents. Scotland has already enacted similar measures in what it calls “rent pressure zones”. Labour’s 2017 manifesto promised similar moves.

Such changes, as the mayor acknowledges, are not without risk. Like it or not, private landlords have become essential to the supply of housing, including for the most vulnerable tenants. But doing nothing is not an option. In the capital, it is predicted that 40% of households will be renting privately by 2025. These people are entitled to protection from rent rises, unscrupulous or inept landlords, evictions and insecurity leading to disruption of work and education. But they also deserve support as they face the ordinary facts of life – illness, child-rearing and ageing – that make their high rents unsustainable.

Rising prices have conditioned British property owners to view housing as an asset. But when the market is propped up by profits made from a new generation of tenants, it is clear that property-owning democracy has gone badly wrong.