Ours is not a hard-luck story. The real exiles are families whose rent is covered by housing benefit, tipping their nominal income from benefits over the level of the government cap of £500 per week. That excludes any family property in central London. Council tenants with spare rooms have also been hit by the “bedroom tax”. Estimates of the total number forced to move by combined changes in the social security regime over the past five years are disputed, ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands. The Department for Work and Pensions says people are responding to work incentives, seeking new lives elsewhere; the opposition calls it social cleansing.

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‘Drumming the steering wheel, cursing the other drivers’: queuing for traffic gave Rafael Behr time to contemplate the perversity of living in London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
The underlying problem is the chronic housing shortage. Estate agents, politicians and policy experts agree that London needs 40-50,000 new homes every year to compensate for generations of shortfall. Last year 18,260 were completed – up 2% on the previous year. That which is built must also be affordable, but demand still gallops ahead of supply. So, in accordance with the oldest law in economics, prices go berserk. The average deposit required to buy in the capital is £70,000, which leaves two ways to get on to the ladder: one is to be extremely rich, the other is to be quite rich and then borrow more money than you could ever repay.

The rest rent. The amount they pay has increased at rates far outstripping national inflation at a time when wages have stagnated. It is now common for tenants to pay well over half of their income on housing before feeding, clothing and heating themselves. It is hardly surprising that increasing numbers consider that a bad deal. The prospect of eking out a family life in a windowless shoebox is driving some 30-somethings out of the capital. There will always be new arrivals to replace them. The opportunities are magnetic enough to draw in successive generations of ambitious youth, not least from overseas, although the rate of churn will increase. No doubt the next Google is being cooked up by whip-smart kids in a Shoreditch tech-lab right now, although I’ll bet some of their start-up capital (not to mention their rent) is from the bank of Mum and Dad.

Historically migrants, internal and foreign, would arrive in the inner city and graduate to leafier parts as their incomes increased. That trend is reversing as central properties become more desirable. In the future there will be a hereditary class of central Londoners employing a financially precarious, casual labour force commuting in from the outskirts, grinding out a low-paid existence, noses pressed against the glass of the glitzy quarters. It is a process described by Alan Ehrenhalt, a US author and chronicler of urban trends, as “the great inversion” – a transition from the 20th-century model of poor downtown boroughs surrounded by affluent suburbs to a 21st-century pattern of exclusive enclaves and poor migrants encamped on the periphery.