My daughter was 13 months old when I received the eviction notice. I was living in a hostel in Stratford, London E15. The letter said that we had two months to get out. We were homeless; that’s why we were in the hostel in the first place. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. There were 210 other young women living there. Now it’s luxury flats. The council said they would rehouse us, but it turned out they were threatening to move us hundreds of miles away, to Manchester, Hastings and Birmingham.

When we met Newham’s Labour mayor, Sir Robin Wales, he told us: “if you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham”.

We grew up in Newham. We find this attitude disgusting. No one on low wages or benefits, or even an average income, can afford to live here.

Newham is a place for a variety of people, not just one class. We know that Newham is not alone either – people are being displaced every day from boroughs all over London. This is why we formed the Focus E15 Mothers campaign to fight for decent, local social housing for all those who need it.

The boarded-up council house in Stratford, east London, occupied by Focus E15. Photograph: /davidxgreen.com

This weekend, the Open House event ran across London. It gave people the opportunity to go inside buildings across the capital that are usually closed to the public. We decided to participate by opening up a closed council house on the Carpenters Estate, a large public housing estate next to the Olympic Park. Many residents have been evicted and cleared out of here by Newham council, which is trying to capitalise on the Olympics by selling the land off to private developers. They have tried every trick in the book to get rid of the remaining residents. They even told them there was asbestos in the tower blocks to get them out before the Olympics, and then let al-Jazeera and the BBC use one of the blocks during the games. Now the estate remains empty except for a handful of people.

The boarded-up house we have opened is in beautiful condition. It has running water, a power shower, working gas and electricity. Just by adding a sofa, table and chairs and some plants, we have turned this house into a home, and solved the housing crisis for one of the 6,500 rough sleepers or thousands of other homeless people in London. Newham council claims it can’t afford to house us, yet it found the money to hire dozens of private security guards on Sunday to try, unsuccessfully, to keep us out of the empty properties on the Carpenters Estate.

There are more than 2,000 other properties on the Carpenters Estate alone that could be made available as homes almost instantly. But the council leaves them to rot and deteriorate through weather damage, so they are in a bad enough way for the council to say they are in an unliveable condition.

Housing in London is now a commodity that the super-rich buy, like fine wine or art. It has been dubbed the “tax-haven on the Thames”. At least £122bn of property in England and Wales is held through companies registered in offshore tax havens, resulting in the loss of billions of pounds of tax that could be used to rebalance the housing market.

We wanted to participate in Open House to show how many houses sit empty in London and what an easy solution there is to the housing crisis.

This crisis, as it is usually covered in the newspapers, is one experienced by the middle classes, whose steady march from private renting to home ownership has been stopped in its tracks by the hugely inflated market. For members of the working class, however, the crisis is much more virulent. It involves not only the prospect of annual rent increases, the impossibility of home ownership and poor-quality housing, but also removal and displacement from the place in which you were born, leading to isolation in a place where you know nobody and opportunities for jobs are non-existent.

A new type of housing has been put in place called “affordable housing”, which has replaced social housing. It sounds good, but affordable housing costs up to 80% of the market rate – and is still ridiculously unaffordable. It makes no more sense to have a free market in housing than one in education, water or healthcare.

Housing, like these other things, is a basic human right, not a privilege. This is why we are demanding social housing, not social cleansing. In addition, rent caps to limit out-of-control rents, mansion taxes and higher stamp duty for the wealthiest would be simple reforms that have a dramatic impact on housing. Simply taking action to restrict the privileges of the 1% could result in a relatively fairer housing situation in London.

• The Carpenters Open House will run until 28 September. All are welcome to come and view the house and engage in discussions about how to address the housing crisis