For a long time, I’ve been watching London’s rental market reach levels that just don’t make sense for most working people. Rents have shot up dramatically compared with what people actually earn and while some headlines about London rent inflation have recently eased, the overall cost burden on tenants remains high across England. According to the Office for National Statistics (2025), average private rents in England were around £1,424 per month in late 2025, representing sustained growth relative to incomes and cost of living, even as inflation slows. Meanwhile many households in England now spend well over the traditionally accepted 30 % of income on rent, with London at around 41 % of income in 2024 (ONS, 2025); figures that signal persistent affordability stress despite small fluctuations in rental inflation.

This pressure does not only stay in London. As working renters increasingly struggle to afford urban rents, many have looked to surrounding areas such as Essex or Kent for more attainable housing. However, even outside the capital advertised rents in parts of the UK have climbed to new records, with some reports showing average advertised prices outside London exceeding £1,300 per month, a level that, while lower than the capital, still represents a high proportion of living costs for many households.

Despite this, rental insecurity persists. Stable long-term tenures are rare, and many renters remain in precarious cycles of repeated moves, short leases and limited ability to save or build security for the future (Shelter, 2024; McKee et al., 2019). These patterns continue even for people in regular employment, which suggests that housing insecurity is no longer just about unemployment, but about a structural mismatch between income, cost of housing and opportunity (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2023).

This project focuses on a cohort I’m referring to as the financial grey zone: individuals who earn above the thresholds for social housing eligibility but are excluded from stable private rental and priced out of meaningful home ownership. This group is primarily single working adults aged approximately 20 to 60 without dependents; a deliberately broad spectrum that includes early-career renters facing entry-level wage ceilings, mid-career renters who have spent years without housing progression and later-career renters who remain in the rental sector long after it was once assumed they would exit. The age range captures those who are continuously exposed to rental insecurity and locked out of ownership, rather than transitional renters passing briefly through the market.

Rather than treating this as an abstract policy issue or a purely architectural exercise, this research positions itself within UK Built Environment discourse, aiming to understand and intervene in how housing is designed, delivered and materially experienced in the context of affordability pressures. The central premise is that housing stability (long treated as a social outcome or a policy target) must be reframed as a type of infrastructural condition, something that housing systems can be intentionally designed to support rather than merely respond to.

To explore this, the project proposes investigating whether 3D-printed homes can contribute to delivering durable, cost-effective housing that speaks to the needs of this grey-zone market. It examines the potential of a dedicated estate model that integrates spatial and social systems aimed at long-term occupation, alongside a rental model that embeds a savings mechanism within monthly payments to give residents greater agency and a pathway toward financial resilience. Supporting this is an exploration of how tenant-facing digital systems might enable more stable, equitable living arrangements.

Taken holistically, this research asks: what does a new approach to housing look like for people whom current systems consistently leave insecure? And how might design, technology and tenure innovation contribute to a form of housing that supports long-term stability as a foundational norm, not an exception?