London is unaffordable – even for an optimist like me

I received a letter this week which tested this. Letters just aren’t good news in 2026, are they? I couldn’t tell you when I last opened one and proceeded to have a good time. I had no great expectations when I opened this one letter from my landlord, and that only made it more painful.

As it turns out, my rent will be going up by £184 a month from April. I read the figure then read it again: for a short but blissful amount of time, I assumed that I’d somehow misunderstood it, or they’d got it wrong. Eventually, I had no choice but to accept the unacceptable. 

My rent went up by £100 a month last year and this year it’s going up by nearly twice that. I live alone and am attached to my little flat, so will have no choice but to find a way to squeeze those extra pounds out of my budget. I know I can do it: I’m financially responsible and am always on top of my finances. It’ll be fine.

In fact, by the end of that fateful day, my mood had picked up again. I wasn’t exactly thrilled, and I struggled to find silver linings, but I knew things were going to be okay. The “how”, “when” and “why” of things actually getting better still eluded me, but again: it’s just who I am. 

I remained fairly buoyant for a few days after that, until I came across a report in the Financial Times which made my soul sink down into my socks. “In order to alleviate its acute housing affordability crisis, London has been set a target of building 88,000 new homes per year over the next decade,” the piece started. So far so good! Targets are useful and it is encouraging that they’re being set. Sure, they’re only a first step, but one in the right direction. 

Unfortunately, “last year construction started on just 5,891 – 94% below target, a 75% year-on-year decline, the steepest drop in the country, the lowest tally since records began almost 40 years ago and the lowest figure for any major city in the developed world this century.”

Now, there are several reasons behind these absolutely, earth-shatteringly catastrophic figures. The introduction of the Building Safety Regulator after the Grenfell Tower fire was one of them. A good idea in theory, the organisation isn’t actually well-resourced enough to do its job, meaning that projects now languish and their costs balloon as the BSR works through its logjams at a glacial pace. 

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Other elements, like enhanced environmental regulations, are similar: good on paper, but problematic in reality. They’re also not wholly relevant to the matter at hand. Mostly, what I would like to ask is: what now? I’m currently financially able to rent a one bedroom flat in a London neighbourhood that’s reasonably central but achingly uncool. This is possible to me because I earn quite considerably more than the average UK wage.

Still, my rent is about to go up by well over 10%, and there is no world in which my earnings will increase by that much anytime soon. What will happen to me next year? There is a point at which I hope that, if things keep going well, my partner and I will move in together, and perhaps even consider buying a place of our own.

How will that be possible in a world where housing is currently unaffordable and nothing is being done to change that? I’m an optimist but I’m not insane. Even my inner belief that things will probably turn out fine has to feed on facts, once in a while. As things stand, I can’t find anything to hold onto.

That’s an issue for me, but I’d argue it’s a wider problem too. If you start losing the glass-half-full people, then alarm bells ought to start ringing in government and elsewhere. There are a lot of people who can deal with day-to-day miseries if they have faith that better days are coming but, once that goes, what exactly are they meant to do?