How does anyone​ make sense of Britain’s rental crisis? Let’s start with Ruby’s story – and that of her landlord, which is inseparable from her own though they’ve never met. Ruby was born in Kent, where her mother had been sent to live as a teenager while under the care of a local authority in London, ‘a forgotten girl’, as Ruby called her, ‘shifted out to wherever was cheap’. The family flitted between council housing and privately rented accommodation; by the age of six, Ruby had already gone to four different primary schools. When she turned eighteen, her father threw her out and she was forced to find a cheap flat of her own.‘I think of those days as my “Margate, mice and maggots” period,’ Ruby said. ‘There was no central heating, no insulation … In the winters, when I lay in bed, I could see my own breath.’ It was the late 2000s and Margate was rapidly gentrifying; when the owner of the flat announced that he was doubling her rent, despite the atrocious conditions, there was little Ruby could do. ‘It’s not like there was any social housing left for my generation. And other private lets were just as expensive. Who could I complain to? What use would it have been?’Driven in part by the need to pay her rent, Ruby looked for a corporate job and landed one recruiting people to sell medical devices. In time, she earned enough to escape the Margate flat and move to London. She wound up living on one floor of a Chelsea townhouse, and got used to champagne, designer handbags and business class travel. ‘The other tenants were investment bankers and drove sports cars; it was a totally different world from the one I’d grown up in,’ she said. Ruby felt financially secure, and when her landlord – a woman who lived in the South of France and referred to rental income as ‘my pocket money’ – decided on a whim to sell the house, issuing the occupants with a Section 21 ‘no fault’ eviction notice, the sudden awareness of her structural vulnerability as a tenant came as a shock.Rub