Everyone is going to have a shit winter, but nobody is going to have as shit a winter as renters. And because my generation is almost exclusively the rental generation (unless you have rich alive parents or rich dead relatives), this basically means that everyone under 40 is going to suffer.

On the Monday morning I’m writing this, the latest round of Westminster musical chairs has delivered Jeremy Hunt on the seat of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Surprisingly enough – Hunt being not only one of the richest men in the Cabinet but also a buy-to-let landlord himself, with no fewer than seven apartments in Southampton – his new budget backs long-overdue rent reform. Cue hysteria among the much-despised landlord class, who worry they’ll “face ruin” as a result of not being allowed to evict people just because they feel like it, or hike prices just because they feel like it, or make their tenants’ lives miserable just because they feel like it. It’s hard not to think: ha! good.

Though let’s be honest, it’s difficult to be optimistic – and not just because in our current hell-times every Tory politician will get their bum on the Chancellor’s seat for the allocated five minutes and almost every policy they make will be reversed and abandoned by the time it’s leaked on Twitter. It’s difficult to be optimistic because for young renters the situation is already diabolical, and promised improvements that might not even materialise will do little to change that situation before the first of next month. On the same day our Chancellor Du Jour proposed rental reform, I checked the tedious little app I use to split household bills with my flatmate and (a recent development, and a fiscally irresponsible one, although the party was great) husband. I realised that: A. I owe him a lot of money. And B. we have cumulatively spent £24,000 on rent, just in our current flat. And we’re lucky! Our landlord is nice! He knows our names and fixes things when we ask him to! (The bar for this, I know, starts on the floor). Side note: I obviously didn’t check how much we’ve additionally spent on heating and water, for the sake of my mental health.

The rental crisis is of course stopping us all from getting on the property ladder, particularly those living in London, where the chance of ever owning a home seems little more than fantasy. But on a day-to-day level, it’s worse. I have friends pushing thirty who are living with their parents and hating it. TikTok is full of adults posting videos from their mums’ sofas, watching Strictly and half-joking about how depressing it feels. Many of us moved back home during the pandemic, thinking it would be a short-term strategy to save money. Now those savings are spent fighting other people for flats we don’t even like, because the rental market is so tough and estate agents so shameless they send fifty people to view one shithole at the same time. The crisis affects our relationships, too: people shack up with partners they barely know, purely to split the rent, and then end up stuck with each other, because they can’t get by without splitting that rent. One person I know hustled for weeks for a job they didn’t even want, simply because it was much higher paid; they split up with their girlfriend on the day they signed the contract, because now they could afford to live alone. It is, to quote Olivia Rodrigo, the Gen Z Cassandra, brutal out here.

The rental crisis is stopping us all from getting on the property ladder, particularly those living in London

Looking ahead to the future feels uncertain to the point of ridiculousness. A friend recently joked (well, half-joked) that she felt vindicated about never opting into a job-based pension scheme, thanks to the combined fuckery of inflation and lack of job security – nobody knows where they’re going to be in five years, let alone 50. We’ll probably never retire, anyway. Everyone feels they’re teetering on the edge of a quarter-life crisis and is nihilistic about the idea of savings; everyone smokes Elf Bars and will happily spend over a tenner on a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco; everyone says things that are objectively insane, such as: “Yes, I think I will spend over £300 on a Glastbonbury ticket.” You can’t really blame them: what’s the point of saving up for a deposit on a home you’ll never have? Every other Instagram story is about a leaving-drinks for someone heading off to Asia or Australia or America. There’s nothing keeping them here except council tax bills and aggy messages from a landlord who’s either 50 years older, with no concept of how hard things are, or five years younger, with a rich dad and no interest in finding out. 
I had a revelation the other day, while I was queuing in the Co-op to pay for bits that inexplicably cost about 30 quid and idly reading the depressing news-stand front pages. I cannot remember a time when we, the public, the adults who came of age among endless economic and environmental and political crises, weren’t being advised to prepare and brace for a hellish winter. The realisation was sobering and depressing. Like poppy season and the argument over whether we should censor Fairytale of New York, the latest warnings that winter might actually kill us have simply become part of the Gregorian calendar of modern Britain. And we’ve somehow become inured to that, just as we’ve become inured to the constant chaos in Westminster being a distraction rather than any hoped-for source of reform.

Róisín Lanigan is a writer and editor based in Belfast and London