I’m not sure how we should celebrate Shelter’s 50th birthday. Fifty years since the charity was launched to publicise Britain’s housing crisis, today they’re processing more calls than ever, 1,200 a day, as house prices rise and social housing dies, as 53% of renters are having trouble paying their landlords for homes that are often, if not those slums of 1966, in poor condition. Over the past five years the number of homeless people in temporary accommodation has risen by 26%. The number of families living in bed and breakfasts has doubled. Despite Shelter’s efforts, over the past 50 years the housing crisis has been bulldozed and rebuilt into something like a disaster. A nice cake doesn’t seem quite appropriate.

Jesus though. This place we find ourselves. This place of small disasters stacked high in apartment blocks, living rooms that are not now nor ever have been living. This place with its shitty rentals, four walls and no windows, because there’s nothing left to see. How depressing that Shelter is needed more than ever, and how depressing that this comes as no surprise. The photos around Christmas of the unheated garage that a Portuguese family of three had been renting near Leicester – no, sorry, the section of the unheated garage they’d been renting – for £400 a fortnight were bleak, obviously, but peak bleak was reached when we read that the family had been nervous about complaining, because they knew how hard it would be to find anywhere better.

Browse Zoopla one evening, I dare you, and see the sheds in front rooms, the bunkbeds in kitchens

The junior doctors’ strike led the news last Tuesday, which meant the Housing and Planning Bill passed with little noise. Scheduled to begin at 3.30pm, it started at almost 9pm, finishing five hours later. “That is not grown up,” complained Labour MP Fiona Mactaggart. “It is a return to the days when I first came to this house and voted against beating children at 4am. I vowed never to have such important votes at that time of the morning again.” Sixty-five pages of new clauses were silently added to the bill, with (the Independent reported) a “flurry of Tory MPs magically appearing” to vote at the last minute. They voted, among other things, for the Secretary of State to set the definition of what is an “affordable” home.

Earlier, Tory MP Chris Philp “snorted” that £250,000 for a starter home was “extremely affordable”, illustrating immediately what a flaccid, empty word that is in this context. Shelter have estimated that by 2020, in order to buy a “starter home” (itself paid for by cutting the provision of social housing) in London you will need to earn £77,000 a year, having first saved £98,000 for a deposit. What is “affordable” for a company buying-to-let is markedly less so for a family who are, say, paying £400 for half a garage, let alone for a junior doctor. While the Bill was debated, it was reported that the room was alight with a background “tinkling”; of MPs on their phones, playing Candy Crush.

By the end of the 1960s, as Shelter took its first steps, the home industry was looking good. Home ownership was growing rapidly, as was social renting, with a huge decline in private renting. Today the opposite is true. Shelter’s charts are painfully simple, a mirror of no hope. And the places up for rent – browse Zoopla one evening, I dare you, and see the sheds in front rooms, the bunkbeds in kitchens – the places that look like they’ve gone to a Halloween party as Cathy Comes Home. They are not worth a fraction of the thousands they’re asking. And I know, “the market”, “They’re worth what someone will pay” etc, but so often that is categorically bollocks. They are savings’ sinkholes to sleep in. The person who rents that bedroom will do so because they have no choices left.

And, unless they’re selling something truly hellish, it’s not just the landlords’ fault (because why wouldn’t they charge market rent, when they, presumably, have crippling mortgages?) And it’s not just the developers’ fault (because why wouldn’t they build their high rises if they can get millions from investors using the apartments – never flats – as mattresses to stuff with cash?) It is the fault of politicians voting at 2am, on short-term plans that benefit only the wealthy and the lucky. Like a landlord renting out a garage – a section of a garage – they are selling a place they’d never live in themselves.

Screw it, let’s have cake.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman