The UK has few rights for tenants, and those it does have are frequently ignored. If you stick up for your rights you will find yourself homeless.
I am not exaggerating, there is no register of landlords, there are a lot of bad amateur landlords who bought into cheap "buy to let" mortgages. Agents don't stick up for tenants.
Here in England I have lost deposit money because of blu-tacking a poster to a wall. (That was pre TPS but still).
It is a culture where it is stacked against the renter. You don't feel like it is your home. And in many cases it isn't, the problem isn't just about renting,it is also about house sharing.
Lots of what were two bed houses are now 2 separate 2 bed flats (Convert downstairs room and basement to bedrooms, squeeze in extra kitchenette upstairs). The quality of housing is decreasing to match demand.
And even where that hasn't happened you'll find multi - tenancy is common.
Local economic conditions (incomes and rising rents especially) and renter laws aren't equal everywhere. Here in NYC market rate renters can expect 4-10% rent increases a year and can be tossed out for almost any reason whatsoever. In SF they have the Ellis Act. My understanding is that in places like Germany, where renting is common, things are very different (renters are some kind of partial owners of the places they rent, and enjoy much greater protections than in other places.)
In the most difficult US markets, ownership is a lifeboat on a wild economic sea if you can come up with a downpayment or, even better, can buy outright, as rents tend to grow much more slowly than property taxes. This is doubly true if you own an apartment rather than a house and can just pay a maintenance fee rather than dealing with paying for it yourself.
The German renting market is really interesting. Some reasons contributing to such a low owner rate include, 1: favorable laws in rent control - preventing more than 15% over 3 years (~4% per annum), negating the need to buy to hedge against the risk of huge rent increases[1], 2: the tax policy is structured such that home-owners do not get to deduct things like mortgage interest payments, unlike in the US and Spain, 3: the German banks are inherently risk-adverse and as such have historically been pretty stringent when it comes to lending, 4: in tandem with (3) , there are no government subsidies or programs like the FHA which offers banks the ability to offer mortgages to people with only 3% down.
There is an old joke - person A says "I wish I had enough money to buy an elephant." Person B replies "What would you do with an elephant?" Person A says "I wouldn't buy one, I just wish I had enough money to."
Before I wrote this comment I saw that less than a third of families in California can afford to buy a home. Perhaps for an individual family we could make the argument that they are somehow better off not buying, but I'm not sure it's a good thing that very few of them actually could if they wanted to.
According to this article from The Guardian, it would appear to be similar in France.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/14/why-are-brits-s...