The word "home" used to mean more than just the place you left your stuff while you were at work. It spoke of long-term stability and of investment in a community to which we belonged and which belonged to us. Home was the place, no matter how humble, where we got to let our hair down, paint the walls red (if we wanted to) and mark how tall our children had grown this year on the door frame. Home meant being able to have a pet, come and go as we pleased and rely on the people next door to feed our cat and put out our bins when we were on holiday. It meant the choice between closing the curtains and pretending we weren't in when we needed a duvet day or inviting the whole tribe round for Christmas lunch – so long as they brought their own folding chairs.

Does any of this sound hopelessly old fashioned and out of touch? Is this kind of home a childhood memory rather than a privilege that is experienced daily? Shelter's figures suggest that at least 9 million people are currently renting in the private sector, and the latest British Attitudes Survey shows that a majority of those polled would prefer to own a house. It isn't hard to see why. High rents, expensive letting agency fees (one in three pay more than £500 in non- refundable fees each time they move) and the state of disrepair of many of these homes – more than a third don't meet the government's Decent Homes Standard – are urgent and well-documented problems.

For "generation rent", priced out of home ownership and lodging with reluctant parents or forced into a nomadic lifestyle of short-term contracts and single-room sublets, owning only what can fit into the back of a car and be moved with a month's notice, there are no homes, only houses.

My own experience with finding and making a home is fairly typical of my generation. I spent my childhood in a terraced house on a street full of families. We were friends with the neighbours. On the ending of my parent's marriage, I lived with my mother and siblings in emergency homeless accommodation while waiting to be housed by the council. It took seven months. There are never enough council houses, even fewer now. Since then I've lived in housing association properties, dodgy sublets, student halls, shared houses and dilapidated private rentals. I'm 31 and I've had at least 14 addresses – more, if you count student housing.

Hang out the bunting: a street party in the 50s.

My story isn't unusual. I'm one of the luckier generation renters in that I haven't been housed with my children in single-room B&Bs for months on end, nor have I had to sleep in my car or on a park bench while I wait for an opening in a crowded hostel or in a "converted" garage or hastily insulated garden shed. But while the fortunate renters of my generation – the tenants who have a legal shorthold tenancy with an only ordinarily grasping landlord, those who rely on the kindness of parents and friends – may have a place to store their possessions and to sleep at night, a real home, the home we've all been taught to hope for since we were children, is still a long way off.

Even for those in the best possible circumstances, the way the unregulated private rental industry is working has changed something fundamental about what home means to us. We've lost the privacy that makes a house a home. Many working young people and couples are ineligible for what little social housing there is left and, especially in our big cities, they are unable to afford ever-increasing rental costs or to save for their future. Many of us have friends who live in multiple-occupancy rental houses with a revolving cast of strangers, living rooms and dining rooms turned into extra bedrooms – the only communal space a shared kitchen too small for six people to store more than a day's food, never mind cook and eat together.

Regular and invasive house inspections by letting agents and landlords are constant reminders that we tenants are guests, possibly unwelcome ones. In one house I rented, the shower leaked so badly that part of the living room ceiling caved in. When the letting agent came to inspect the damage, he reminded me to use a bath mat, eyed my daughter's toys and mentioned that any damage caused by "your kid" would be taken out of my deposit. I knew the rules about disrepair; I could withhold rent to cover the costs myself as a last resort, or involve my local authority tenancy officer. But I didn't dare. I'd tried it before, when living in a house with windows so rotten it rained inside as well as outside. On receiving the letter from the council, my landlord, perfectly legally, gave me a month's notice and opted to let the house to someone who didn't mind about the damp so much. So as the letting agent kicked the bits of ceiling about on the carpet and tutted at me, I was polite, smiled nicely and didn't complain when he used his key to come into the house without notice, without knocking.

Isn't a huge part of what we mean when we talk about "home" security and a place to belong? When we have home behind us, we're free to strike out elsewhere, be brave, be adventurous, be ambitious – but you can't put down roots if you don't know where you're going to be living next year. I have happy memories of planting lettuce and peas in the back garden of my granny's council house. It was worth lifting a few paving slabs and building the vegetable beds because we all knew she'd be there for the foreseeable. It was her home: the place we'd always want to come and visit. For many tenants, family life is put on hold until that kind of security arrives – if it ever does.

A home of your own: housing should mean safety, stability and security.

And for those of us who don't wait for the near-impossible dream of ownership before starting our lives and families, a prejudice from letting agents and landlords persists. Being a single mother can be reason enough to deny you a lease, something I was reminded of in a recent conversation with Emily, a woman in her 30s from Manchester. A letting agent had told her: "You don't choose us, we choose you", and after she had paid the agency's fee, she was promptly unchosen by a landlady who'd decided she didn't want a child living in her house. Emily remembers the childhood security of the long-term let that came with her father's job and now worries that she won't be able to provide the same stability for her seven-year-old son.

Last year I WAS able to hoist myself up onto the bottom of the rickety housing ladder, and for the first time since I was 13 years old I have felt at home. My daughter is nine; she's had five addresses already, and I've finally been able to promise her that we won't be packing up again any time soon. I live in the northwest. It's one of the most depressed housing markets in the country, yet I still had to borrow four times my salary and put down a deposit equivalent to two years' wages. If my work or family meant I had to live in the southeast or any of the UK's big cities, we'd still be lurching from shared house to short-term rental and planning life six months at a time. I'd be wondering if it was worth my while risking subletting the spare room to a stranger or if I should rent a house in the sticks and exchange a £75 a month reduction on the rent for an hour-long commute to work each way.

Homing instinct: Jenn Asworth, part of a generation with fading dreams of home ownership. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer

I don't believe that homeowners are a special class of person – more adult, more socially responsible, more invested than the rest of us. I had no burning urge to sink my savings into a pile of stones and sign away the rest of my life to a mortgage company. What I wanted was the same thing as most people my age want: somewhere safe, somewhere secure, somewhere stable. We want it because in a lot of cases it's what our parents had and because we were taught to expect that if we wanted to settle down some time, we would be able to.

Is it really the case that a large proportion of those who rent in the private sector are desperate to indebt themselves to the first bank that will offer them a mortgage? Or is it that they want a home, a real home, and borrowing five times your salary from a bank is now the only way to get one? In parts of Europe, controlled rents and long leases on well-maintained properties in areas where people would actually choose to live are the norm. Before Margaret Thatcher's mission to turn us all into homeowners, many more British people were happy to rent. When survey after survey indicates that most of those who rent would prefer to own their own home, shouldn't we be asking more often, and more loudly, just what is wrong with the rental sector?

Of course it is very easy to romanticise the notion of home, which can also be the location of our worst behaviour, our greatest unhappiness and our most pronounced loneliness. But having security – whether rented or bought – also offers freedom. It shouldn't only be the luckiest of this generation who have the chance to create the homes our parents had.