‘To make the impossible possible. To rise, and rise”. Uttered in a movie-trailer tone, it sounds like the mission statement for a Mars probe – but, set against the backdrop of the twinkling lights of night-time London, it’s actually the voiceover for a particularly obnoxious Redrow ad for flats in one of the capital’s now-ubiquitous glass and steel skyscrapers, launched and hastily withdrawn earlier this month after a furious outburst on social media.

Its sharply suited, go-getting protagonist is whisked through the streets in a cab, reminiscing about all the hours he had to put in (“the mornings … that felt like night”); the calls from mates he was forced to ignore; and the terrible soul-searching he had to endure to succeed (apparently he felt the urge to “be more than individual”). Without encountering another soul, our hero strides into an anonymous lobby and is whisked up to a vast, sparkling eyrie, worthy of a Bond villain’s hideout.

An outraged viewer captured the ad for posterity; rival builder Berkeley Homes pulled its own equally nauseating effort (this one involving a private jet) a few days later. Prices for apartments at One Blackfriars, the tower block being marketed by Berkeley, range up to £23m. And judging by the ad, its lucky inhabitants in their hermetically sealed penthouses will never have to rub shoulders with hoi polloi down at ground level. It’s hard to think of a more powerful symbol of Britain’s divisive, winner-takes-all property market.

Of course, the rich have always been with us, and to some extent have always cut themselves off. Strolling through the Geffrye Museum in east London recently, I was intrigued by a painting from 1936. An elegant, bejewelled woman in a shimmering gown peers languorously out on to a crowded London thoroughfare, perhaps Regent Street or Piccadilly, from a plush, warmly lit salon, while a man faces away from the window with studied nonchalance, blowing smoke rings. Only on reading the inscription does it become clear that the lively scene outside the window is not a celebration or a festival, but the arrival of the Jarrow marchers.

Britain in the 21st century is a very long way from the Great Depression; yet that well-heeled couple’s cosy imperviousness to their fellow humans’ suffering is all there in the “because I’m worth it” high-rise property porn churned out by Redrow, Berkeley and the rest (“They said nothing comes easy; but if it was easy, then it wouldn’t feel as good,” goes the voiceover).

Today’s problems – the ones to which our well-coiffed City boy is wilfully blind – are not those of the Jarrow protesters. Unemployment is just 6%. And there is a social safety net – albeit punctured by vindictive benefits sanctions and patched up by food banks and charity handouts – that softens the worst consequences of falling out of work.

Yet the same crazy market that means you have to “make the impossible possible” in order to afford a high-rise flat means there are millions of people in perfectly good jobs with no prospect of ever affording a decent place to live – unacceptable in an economy that George Osborne boasts can be the world’s richest by 2030.

In many towns and cities, if you’re earning the average wage or thereabouts, you can “aspire” as much as you like, but unless you’ve got a slug of family wealth behind you, you’re never going to get on the property ladder. Research by the Resolution Foundation found that 2.2m working households in Britain with below-median incomes were spending a third or more of disposable income on housing, leaving an average of just £135 a week for other necessities.

Of course, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with renting. But it can be insecure because of the particular nature of the UK rental market, with its short-term tenancies, landlords’ unbridled right to whack up the rent, and eye-watering fees levied by some lettings agents for doing not very much.

Thinktank Civitas, not known as a hotbed of lefties, is arguing for long-term rolling tenancies, under which rents would only rise in line with inflation, so that families living in rented accommodation could plan their finances and avoid the constant risk of eviction. And while we’re at it, why should private landlords receive tax relief on their mortgage interest payments – so-called Miras – when struggling first-time buyers do not?

Boosting housebuilding, if necessary by public commissioning by local authorities, must be another part of the solution. It must be one of the greatest failures of recent public policy that an entire generation of politicians well knew, and many acknowledged, that “we aren’t building enough houses”, but did nothing about it.

As Osborne put it after delivering his lecture at the Bank of England on Wednesday, “it’s an exhortation to the entire political system: we have got to get more homes built, and if we don’t, we are not meeting the aspirations of the people we claim to represent.”

His proposal was a shakeup of planning rules, making it easier for councils to compulsorily purchase land and introducing zoning for brownfield sites, so the presumption would be that they were suitable for housing.

That should help; but the supposedly radical planning changes already carried out by the Tories only resulted in 159,990 houses being built last year – a significant jump since the depths of the crisis, but well below the 200,000-plus seen in the five years before the crash, let alone the 250,000-300,000 many analysts think we will need to keep up with household formation and stabilise prices.

Osborne was keen to talk up the idea that the Bank’s new “macroprudential” toolkit, which allows it to impose loan-to-value limits on mortgages, for example, would prevent future housing bubbles, which have long been a source of instability for the UK economy. He refused to say that flat, or falling, prices are desirable. But polls show that more people would like to see them stabilise or decline than rise.

With that in mind, politicians should promise to pull every lever they have – including planning, regulation and tax – to ensure that housing is no longer a surefire investment for greedy buy-to-letters, or an accoutrement to a luxury lifestyle, but a place to live. Everyone, not just those who “make the impossible possible”, deserves a decent home.