Oobah Butler tackles the housing crisis: 'We’ve become used to the fact that we are screwed'

Oobah Butler is a filmmaker who uses satirical stunts to showcase the absurdities and injustices of modern life. For his latest documentary, How To Trick Your Way Onto the Property Ladder, he takes on the housing crisis, with a bit of help from a hypnotist, Andy Burnham and some boomer-baiting avocado pricing.

Using the visual language of a daytime property show, Butler sets about helping two aspiring future homeowners. Along the way, amid witty stunts and set-ups, he pinpoints the rampant generational injustice of the housing market. 

Butler meets Mo and Insaf, a lovely young couple in Liverpool with four jobs between them – in sales, driving, a beauty studio and a community centre – and zero chance to get on the property ladder, with no savings for
a deposit or family money coming their way. (The bank of mum and dad, Butler says, funded prospective property owners to the tune of £9.4 billion in 2023.) 

The other person keen to find his way into the housing market is a millennial who moved to London from the West Midlands, lived in a shed in Dulwich for three years, and has since stayed in “a litany of shitholes”. His name? Oobah Butler. 

“I’m into my 30s now and I rent still,” Butler explains, when he calls Big Issue ahead of the broadcast of his latest documentary. 

“So many people who worked on my team for this project are exactly the same. You reach a weird crossroads in your 30s. There are big life decisions around having a family or wanting a different lifestyle but there are so many things that you need in place to be able to buy a home, especially if your job places you within a metropolitan area where it’s really expensive. It felt like wherever I looked, housing was the big issue.”

He’s not wrong, of course. 

“Our whole economy is built around the housing market,” Butler continues. 

“It feels like a massive issue at the heart of people’s mental health and their ability to actually live their lives, let alone thrive or have ambitions.”

Oobah Butler has form for this sort of filmmaking. One of his previous projects for Channel 4, The Great Amazon Heist, saw him collect discarded bottles of Amazon drivers’ urine from the roadside and market it as a ‘reusable energy drink’. It was one way to draw attention to profits being built on the back of workers who don’t have time to take a break to take a leak. 

Now, Butler is using similarly smart sequences to show up the cruelty of a housing market stacked against young people. 

Read more:

• Property inflation divided Britain – this is what needs to be done to fix it
• Is the homeownership dream over for young people? Here’s how old the average first-time buyer really is
• The Bank of Mum and Dad has too much influence on homeownership in Britain – that needs to change

Among the baffling things Butler uncovers is the existence of Bona Vacantia – a legal doctrine dictating what happens to property and wealth if people die without a will or close relative. In most of the country, the assets go directly to the treasury. But in Lancashire, most of Merseyside and parts of Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Cumbria, it goes to the Duchy of Lancaster. Bona Vacantia has enriched the monarch to the tune of £60 million in the last 10 years.

“Estates can just be hoovered up by the King’s personal purse. That was a bit of a shock,” says Butler. 

“I spoke to the former mayor of Burnley, who is a royalist. His friend passed away with no next of kin and the Duchy of Lancaster took her bungalow.”

In the film, Butler visits community centres to ask older people if anyone hasn’t got a will and might consider bequeathing their estate to Mo and Insaf. While he didn’t convince them of that, by signing up 12 people to free wills, he may have prevented the king from nabbing £3m worth of housing. 

“Many things would make a bigger difference than changing that law,” he says. “But it is so ridiculously unfair in such a feudal, only-in-Britain way that I was compelled to include it.” 

Whereas 40 years ago the average property cost four times the average salary, today it is many times higher. 

“It’s become normalised for people to expect very little. And I think that’s a real danger,” says Butler.

“We’ve become used to the fact that we are screwed. And the less people expect, the less they will be given.” 

Butler highlights the way housing inflation has outstripped wage growth (and food inflation) by attempting to sell avocados (blamed by an Australian property mogul for young people’s failure to make it onto the housing ladder) for £20. If that price mark-up is absurd, well, posits Butler, so is the cost of housing. 

“Older people are living in one reality and we’re living in another,” he adds. “Our generation is locked out of a lot of things that our parents’ generation did to quantify success and meaning in their lives. And what do we have instead? We eat out a bit more and have a few holidays. But they are lifestyle things. I’ve sort of ambiently known since coming to London that I wouldn’t be owning a home any time soon.”

Among the contributors to Butler’s documentary is Andy Burnham. His explanation for the housing crisis? “Two words: Margaret Thatcher.”

Before Right To Buy was introduced in 1980 council tenants made up 31% of the British population. Now it’s just 17% and 40% of former council homes are owned by private landlords while local councils are spending £2.8bn housing people in temporary accommodation and spending millions yoyo-ing former council homes back into council control. 

Burnham will soon be in a position to do something about all this. He has already laid out plans for ambitious council housebuilding targets. So what did Butler make of him when they met?

“I liked him,” he says. “I didn’t know what to think of him for a long time, but then he did the Hillsborough inquiry stuff, through sheer force of will, which I thought was incredible. 

“He is a great orator and what he’s done with the buses in Manchester is really cool. So although there’s a difference between campaigning and being in office, it would take a massive change for him not to talk about this stuff, wouldn’t it? It is exciting.” 

How to Trick Your Way on to the Property Ladder is on at Channel 4 at 10pm on 13 July

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