The new British class system is about one thing: housing wealth There are two classes of people in Britain now: those who make money from property and those who don’t

If there is one issue sure to come up whenever I see my friends, it’s housing. Without fail, we end up discussing maddening landlords, exorbitant house prices and showing one another screenshots of the unattainable dream homes we’ve bookmarked during fantasy RightMove scrolling sessions.

Housing occupies a central space in all of our lives. Home is our shelter, a basic requirement and our sanctuary, where the most important events in our lives unfold from. Our attachment to it is not just financial but emotional. But, it’s costing some of us more dearly than others and that is now the dividing line down which friendship groups in our supposed meritocracy are split.

Today, class is defined by housing wealth. You could be upwardly mobile on paper, have a good job and a decent salary, and still find yourself living month-to-month because your rent consumes so much of your pay.

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There are two classes of people in Britain now: those who make money from property and those who don’t.

Take my friend with serious inherited wealth, for example. She owns two properties, became a buy to let landlord before the age of 25 and is able to live the millennial dream of pursuing various unprofitable (but highly instagrammable) side hustles because of an abundance of passive income.

And then, consider my friend without family money. She works full time, pays close to £1,000 a month for a room in a shared flat and over the Christmas break was forced to deal with an email from her landlord – the person she hands over huge chunks of her income after tax to every month – accusing her of “talking rubbish” when she alerted him to a foul smell whenever she uses her shower.

Growing up in post-Blair Britain, we were sold a very different idea of what the future would look like if we did what we were told, worked hard at school and went to university. Yet, this tale of two friends tells you everything you need to know about class and social mobility in Britain today and how wealth – not hard work, an expensive university education, grit, determination or sheer talent – still defines our fortunes.

Indeed, more for younger generations today than for our parents or grandparents, you are what your parents have, not what you do. Today, if your parents own property, you’re three times more likely to become a homeowner yourself by age 30.

According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS), at the age of 27, those born in the late 1980s had a homeownership rate of 25 per cent, compared with 33 per cent for those born just five years earlier (in the early 1980s) and 43 per cent for those born 10 years earlier in the 1970s.

It’s also more expensive to buy a home now. After adjusting for inflation, mean house prices were 152 per cent higher in 2015–16 than in 1995–96. However, the real net family incomes of those aged 25 to 34 grew by only 22 per cent over the same 20 years. This has seen social mobility go into reverse. We live in Britain at a time when society looks set to become permanently divided into two groups: those who rent and those own property.

The Great British dream of home ownership, a political narrative exploited by both the right and the left to win elections over the last century, is now all but completely hollow. And, counterintuitive as it is, for renters the less money you have, the more you’re going to spend on housing.

As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation points out, housing costs are increasing most for lower income households who now need a third more disposable income than they did a decade ago to make ends meet. This is because private rents have gone up over the last 20 years and because many people who would once have been housed in council housing are now in the private rented sector because we allowed huge swathes of social housing to be sold off and never replaced.

It’s positively feudal. While some people have made their fortune on rising house prices and cashed in on rising rents, others have been impoverished.

Read more Why it’s time to start taxing people on the wealth they accumulate from property

As we closed 2019 with a shotgun general election, housing was the burning issue that largely seemed to fall by the wayside. Wherever you live in the country, it affects you, and yet it was barely mentioned in any TV debate or leader’s speech.

The Conservatives won with the largest majority since Blair in 2001 but, by and large, they had the least ambitious housing policies of all parties. Despite reinforcing Theresa May’s commitment to end Section 21 evictions with the Renters’ Rights Bill, they fell back lazily on the idea that a supply shortage is the reason for our housing crisis. This is no more than thinly veiled cover for not investing in more social housing or further regulating the private rented sector in favour of tenants.

We may have begun a new year with a new government, leaving election debates behind, but we should remember three key things that were raised in both the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos: private rents are too high for most people and so we need some form of rent regulation, we don’t have enough social homes and urgently need to build more and, before we hemorrhage any more public money, housing benefit should be adjusted so that it is actually tied to local rents.

If we continue to ignore the fact that the housing crisis has consistently demonstrated that it will not right itself without intervention for over a decade, we risk permanently entrenching inequality, dividing Britain into those who own homes and those who do not and deciding their life chances accordingly.

Vicky Spratt is i‘s Housing Correspondent