What happens to family life when so many parents can only rent, not buy?

The ascending lines on the wall, dated and initialled; the tiny scar from the toddler tumble on the patio outside; the muscle memory that lets you skip the squeaky third stair from the top late at night. They’re unsung in interior design magazines but these are the kinds of details that truly make a house a home. They accrete over time, as residence and residents imprint themselves upon one another, helping parents to sleep at night and becoming the warp and weft of children’s memories. But for a large and growing number, these are intimacies that remain unknown thanks to the rise in families forced to rent rather than buy.

The number of tenants with children who rent privately has risen steeply in recent years. The 2006/7 English Housing Survey reported that there were 800,000 families in rented accommodation; by 2016/17, that figure had risen to 1.8 million. As of this year, half of UK babies are now born to renters.

Though legislation has gradually been increasing tenant rights, a rapidly expanded private rental market remains ill-suited as a provider of family homes. Year-long rolling tenancies mean that insecurity is a permanent presence—a landlord could at any moment choose to raise the rent or sell up. With children, an unplanned move can mean not just expense and inconvenience but changes of school and the loss of friends. Meanwhile, six-monthly inspections make parents extra-watchful, unable to let their child choose the colour of their room or even hang a picture. Some landlords refuse to rent to tenants with kids in the first place.

I grew up in rented accommodation in East Anglia in the 1980s. My infancy was spent in an unmodernised farm cottage with neither hot water nor a bathroom, just an outdoor loo permanently occupied by a newt. There was no gas, and electricity came from a generator at the bottom of the garden that worked only between the hours of six and nine each evening. Upstairs, snow would drift in through the roof. We were still living there when the place was condemned.

We were lucky with the next move, renting from the National Trust. I apparently spent the entire tenancy interview saying I wanted to go home, which perhaps struck a plaintive note despite its whining pitch. Back then, the Trust charged below market rates, meaning that while there was no central heating, and the front door had to be painted a regulation grey-green, the bulk of my childhood was stable. We had neighbours who’d lived in their rented homes for nearing half a century.

Neither of my parents has ever managed to buy. Instead of a mortgage, they got a divorce, and me, my sister and our mum moved to the lodge of a derelict country house. The nearest neighbour was a silent farmer’s son who would occasionally appear at the top of our densely rhododendron-ed driveway, a shotgun slung over his shoulder, and our rent was discounted since our presence was supposed to deter squatters.

After that came London, and the pace at which our address changes quickened. I’d left for university by then, and when new friends asked me about “home,” I was happy to claim the capital, even though the three of us spent much of that first summer camped out in my mother’s friend’s spare room.

In the decades since, my mum has moved every few years, initially with my younger sister in tow and rarely out of choice. Now a pensioner, she’s still renting on the private market, never having quite been deemed needy enough for social housing, despite having been left homeless on more than one occasion. As such, she’s part of a demographic that’s poised to increase, creating its own distinct challenges.

Years ago, I remember being lectured by my first newspaper boss about the property ladder. It’s a measure of the security that my childhood was imbued with that I only half listened. That came from my mum more than from the bricks and mortar that housed us. Home was in the stories she spun for us, the chicken soup with rice that she made, the puppets she hand-stitched. But if we’d been renting in the way that many families today are forced to, the added stresses and strains would have taken their toll on that same inventiveness.

The continuity of family life can only be compromised by constant upheaval. No matter how long you live in a rented place, it is never truly yours. My own daughter is growing up in the flat that I thankfully own, albeit with a mortgage, and when she asks about where I spent my childhood, I take her to there with tales of Jack Frost painting on the inside of bedroom windows and dark corridors that I was always too spooked to do anything but belt down. But sometimes, I can’t help wondering what it would be like to be among that shrinking group whose family, singular, remains rooted exactly where they left it—a time-capsule tangle of outgrown obsessions thickening in the attic, the third stair from the top still squeaky.