Lyndsey Garratt had never heard of Richard Benyon – until he wound up buying her home and those of her 92 neighbours. Now that the millionaire Tory MP and his business partners threaten to make them all homeless, the 35-year-old mother can’t stop talking about him.

Garratt lives on the fringes of the City of London, on the New Era estate. Built by a charitable trust in the mid-1930s, the redbrick square has provided homes to local working people at affordable rents. There was a time when the term “affordable housing” was not a sick joke, when inner London did house people on moderate incomes. But now the capital has become a global hotspot for property speculators; Hoxton is overrun with overpriced burger joints and media start-up companies, and New Era is one of the last estates to provide working-class Londoners with a home.

At least it was until Benyon’s family firm recently moved in as part of a property consortium and snapped up the lot. The investors have made no bones about jacking up rents to match the rest of the market. Garratt was previously paying about £640 a month for the two-bed she shares with her daughter; when her contract expires in July 2016 residents expect they will be charged around £2,400 a month. For Garratt, a care co-ordinator at the local NHS trust, that is way more than her entire take-home pay.

Council officers have already told her what that means. As a single mother, she and eight-year-old Daisy will be moved into a homeless shelter, for anything up to four years; then it’s temporary accommodation, which could be in Manchester or Birmingham. Since the buyout, Garratt’s rent has already shot up by £160 a month, while the latest NHS reorganisation has cut her pay by £300 a month. “I’m getting stretched at both ends,” she says – and is already hacking away at her outgoings, cancelling even little things like trips with Daisy to the local Italian for a plate of spag bol.

All those bromides from politicians about the importance of housing key workers and the glory of the NHS – they count for nothing here. And as Garratt and her friends tell me, they’re not even the worst off. Garratt’s parents also live in the estate – her dad has chronic lung disease – and now face living out their years in sheltered housing. If these families and friends are scattered across the country, who will provide the free childcare or look in on the elderly and sick? “An entire community is going to be smashed up,” says resident Danielle Molinari.

Ah, community: a word that should carry some weight with Benyon. The Tory MP lives in a splendid stately home just outside Reading, Englefield House, complete with deer park and 3,500 acres of woodlands. Within the estate’s walls lies most of Englefield village. How does the old hymn go? The rich man in his castle; the poor man at his gate … But if there is one thing Benyon has proved in parliament, it’s that he doesn’t have much time for the poor. He backed the bedroom tax and readily attacks the “something for nothing” welfare state.

Happily, the former minister and I agree on that last point. I can’t stand spongers who get something for nothing, either. Except in my book that category includes Benyon himself, who inherited his giant pad, as well as land stretching from London to Berkshire to Inverness – a whopping slice of Britain that makes up a family fortune worth anywhere between £110m and £200m. It applies to the £2m of public money that Benyon took from Brussels to keep up his farmland (I asked Benyon whether that figure was correct and he didn’t deny it). And it certainly takes in the £625,000 of our money that Benyon’s estate took in tenants’ housing benefit last year from just one council, West Berkshire.

Given the subject of taking something for nothing, Benyon could win Mastermind. Whereas Garratt is counting down the days until she is made homeless and is a complete innocent. She was receiving tax credits of £46 a week – until that got stopped due to “overpayment”. Except that list of subsidies that help Benyon eke out his living doesn’t stop there. Because we are effectively paying him and his fellow investors to put Garratt, her family and fellow residents out on the street (or, as the MP put it to me, to “seek alternative accommodation”).

Britain loves its landlords, even while it punishes their tenants. Len Gibbs, who has been a housing market professional for 28 years and heads a housing association in Stoke, has written a paper called Fuelling Pauperism, which itemises how taxpayers throw money at Benyon and other landlords. On that list is how, even amid historic spending cuts, David Cameron found £1bn for a Build to Rent programme, with a further £3.5bn in guarantees for the rental market.

Then there’s the £9bn a year we hand to private landlords in housing benefit (which Gibbs projects to hit £15bn by 2019); the £375bn pumped into the financial system in quantitative easing, which has pushed up property prices and fuelled lending to landlords and other members of the asset-rich; and the £5bn in tax reliefs for landlords’ business expenses, and the plethora of other concessions.

The former housing minister Grant Shapps last year described private landlords as “the unsung heroes of the housing market”. Yet these heroes, as Gibbs points out, jostle first-time buyers off the housing ladder and swipe money that could build public housing. The £1bn spent on build-to-rent alone, he estimates, could instead have been used to build 50,000 units of social housing.

You may not like the sound of what could be called Benyonism, but we’ve been paying for it for years: throwing billions at millionaires to better enable them to shaft the poor. Perhaps it has taken this crisis – a combination of austerity and a housing bubble in London – to bring it home to a critical mass of people.

“Until this happened I had no clue about politics; it’s opened my eyes to how people like us are treated,” Garratt says. She fits what for me has become a recognisable type in the housing crisis: the mother who never used to think of herself as “political” until – bam! – an existential threat comes her way and she fights like mad. Then this mild woman gets on to Benyon’s Tory party and its friends in the press: “They make us turn on each other. Bloody asylum seekers are the problem; people on benefits are the scum of the earth. And we’re coming to a point where people like us, working people, finally say, ‘You know what? you’re the problem. We’ve had enough of people like you.’”

When even the supposedly apolitical are talking like this, you have to wonder what hope there is for any of the folk in Westminster.