With a shortage of affordable housing, the atmosphere of desperation is ripe for scams. Last month, a group of swindlers set up a fake letting agency, hired an Airbnb flat, and took the first month’s rent and deposit from five sets of unsuspecting would-be tenants before disappearing into the darkness.

Back in Stratford, adjacent to the Olympic site, lies the Carpenters Estate. In 2012, Newham Council evicted some of the project’s social housing residents, insisting that the site was marked for demolition. Two years later, the homes had been left empty and forgotten. Around the same time, in another part of Stratford, a group of young mothers received eviction notices. They had two months to leave the homeless hostel they were staying in, and the council had plans to move them miles away. The Focus E15 mothers fought back, and were eventually rehoused in private tenancies in the borough. Last month, they occupied the abandoned Carpenters Estate to make a political point.

London is unashamedly stratified. It was always a city where extreme poverty lived cheek by jowl with extreme wealth, but the contrasts are starker than ever. Where a majority is scrambling to make ends meet, a wealthy minority treats the city purely as an asset base for investment.

Day-to-day living is precarious for those not born into wealth. Private tenants are subjected to the constant rigmarole of moving because of short-term contracts and annual rent increases, or they find that their overseas landlord is selling the place they call home because its value has increased sharply. Those without London’s capital find themselves at the mercy of it.

Social mobility has become social stagnation. With housing at a premium, London rents are eye-wateringly expensive in comparison with the rest of the country. Tenants turn to the state for help, but these are not welfare cases: Nationally, over 90 percent of all new claims for housing benefits are from households where at least one adult is working. Lawmakers, of course, are lax on the issue. That may be because a third of them are buy-to-let landlords.

It has long been the consensus that young people today will never enjoy the easy circumstances that the generation before us could take for granted. But this isn’t just a generational issue; it is a class issue.

My single mother was never afforded the privileges of a secure job for life or homeownership. Even those whose parents had those things are coming to the recognition that this is no longer their reality. More and more of us are realizing that London is not for the likes of us.

Reni Eddo-Lodge is a freelance writer who contributes regularly to The Daily Telegraph.