There has been much interest in young people in the aftermath of the election. Reporters have focused on a youth surge that may be the reason May lost her majority, with increased numbers of young voters turning out who seem to have largely opted for the Labour party.

But could it be that this trend is in fact an indicator of the same old class politics? A YouGov study released last week suggested that class had been turned on its head – with results that showed that you were just as likely to vote Tory if you worked in a manual labour job as if you were upper or middle class. But the real indicator here was age – Labour outperformed the Conservatives in every age group until people reached their 50s.

This chimes with a Shelter report showing a significant swing towards Labour among private renters, who are naturally overrepresented in younger age groups.

In today’s rental market, you can be typically middle class in terms of your income, but at a huge financial disadvantage compared with property-owning, typically older groups if you rent privately. In other words, money alone doesn’t make you middle class. Even with a big pay packet, rents are high enough to seriously affect your disposable income, and considerably disadvantage your experience of life.

This year, prices in the private rental market dropped for the first time in six years, with the UK average rent falling to £921 a month. ONS data puts the average UK wage at around £27,000. This figure is skewed upwards by the small number of people who earn disproportionately more than the average, but if even you are lucky enough to earn that, you’re still spending around 50% of your wages on rent every month.

‘Labour outperformed the Conservatives in every age group until people reached their 50s.’ Young Labour voters with shadow chancellor, John McDonnell Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty

Even for high earners, UK house prices have spiralled out of control in recent years. The current average house costs more than £207,000, meaning that you are more likely to be putting your earnings towards someone else’s future in rent than saving for your own.

The Conservative manifesto – which offered sweeteners such as a ban on letting fees that can cost renters as much as £350 a pop – made a stab at appealing to this group, but unfortunately didn’t go far enough. One-off payments are a scourge, but worse is the barrier that private renting puts in the way of a decent quality of life. High rents and short leases mean that young people are now putting off big decisions such as having a baby or getting married, while others are staying in the family home, with no real autonomy, far into their 20s.

While successive governments have put faith in the private rental sector to provide homes (it now provides one in six homes), it hasn’t stopped rogue landlords from charging huge fees or turfing people out at the slightest whiff of a higher rate from someone else, because they know that people are still desperately in need of housing.

And there are other problems that keep housing in sharp political focus for private renters. I currently live in a three-bedroom house with four other people (luckily, I live with couples) in order to bring my rent down. Far from being fancy, it was one of the cheapest places I could get – on the top floor of a council estate. Even so, I need to work at four jobs in order to afford the rent and still eat each month.

And that’s ignoring all the other problems, such as the wrestle between us for the one shower in the mornings, or the fact that we can never have guests round without it basically being a party. But other friends of mine who use a living-room as their bedroom, have a morning dress-routine that involves whipping clothes on and off faster than Beyoncé backstage at the VMAs – just to avoid an accidental stripshow to the other housemates trying to eat breakfast.

Of course Labour doesn’t have all the answers to this crisis, and indeed played a part in creating it under the Blair government. But while this election saw the Tories failing to commit to any concrete number of affordable homes, the Labour party’s pledge of 500,000 social and council homes went some way to redressing the huge expansion of the private rental market that has allowed landlords to go unchecked for so long.

In the heyday of Thatcher’s creation of a “homeowning democracy”, she brought people over to the Conservatives by letting them buy their council homes. Today, as those homes haven’t been replenished and the private market has run amok, that Conservative dream has been shattered – and, once again, class and how it intersects with housing seems to be a key factor underpinning voter turnout.