Gen Z Londoners are handing out ‘awards’ to the organisations they blame for the housing crisis

Gen Z Londoners are taking aim at the billionaire property developers, tycoons and landlords they blame for the English capital’s housing crisis with a cheeky set of awards.

The Youth Home Owner Awards have made their debut in 2025 but it’s unlikely many of the winners will fancy another gong next year. 

The satirical awards, created by a youth homelessness campaigning collective in partnership with the Museum of Homelessness, has seen youngsters attempt to give out awards to the huge London housing associations and billionaire property developer and Reform UK donor Nick Candy. Not that many of the winners have been up to accept the awards.

The collective attempted to hand-deliver the lifetime achievement award for public asset extraction to Candy last week. The billionaire’s property portfolio includes the Knightsbridge penthouse One Hyde Park which is on the market for a cool £175 million.

Once Candy’s team realised what the award was for, the collective were promptly asked to leave the premises of Candy Capital.

Similarly, the eviction excellence award was then refused by Notting Hill Genesis – which the collective accused of turning from a former social housing champion to a corporate landlord. So far, none of the winners have accepted their prizes.

One of the young people from the collective, Ocean, 24, told the Big Issue that they got a frosty reception when trying to hand out the awards.

“They were quite awkward and did not want to speak to us,” they said.

“They were like: can you email us everything about the awards before we can accept it.

“People don’t want our awards. I don’t know why.”

The winners of the seven awards were revealed daily last week on the group’s Instagram account.

Prices included the social cleansing award, handed out for displacing communities through estate regeneration in Southwark and Haringey. The clearance award dealt with the demolition of a community hub in North Kensington. 

There were also awards for alleged greenwashing, failing to respond to residents’ complaints and for reportedly leaving a disabled tenant trapped because of a broken lift that took three weeks to fix.

Another member of the collective Rohan, 24, told Big Issue that the group hope the stunts will raise awareness of the role organisations play in the housing crisis.

“We want to raise awareness of what they’re doing – obviously in a pretty tongue in cheek style – with these pretty unsavoury awards. I think a lot of people in London are very much aware that there’s this housing crisis where housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable,” said Rohan.

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“But not a lot of people really have the perception that these wealthy property developers and housing associations have a big part to play in it so we really wanted to bring more awareness to that.”

Rohan, who came to the group after reading about it on Jeremy Corbyn’s Instagram, added that he believed rising rents and house prices in recent years as well as the focus on building luxury flats rather than social housing was forcing people out of London.

“It’s making it really difficult for us to afford to live there,” he said. 

“I’ve also noticed that I’ve constantly been seeing these really expensive high rises popping up everywhere in those areas. The way I see it: it is often those kind of developments which are responsible for pushing the working class people out of those areas.”

“So we very much wanted to target these kind of groups who we believe do have the power and the ability to make change for good, but they often don’t. We wanted these awards to highlight the wrongs that we think that they’re doing in our community, in our city.”

In response to the Youth Home Owner Awards 2025, a Notting Hill Genesis spokesperson told Big Issue: “We welcome open, constructive dialogue so that we can help address the issues raised and do better for our residents. Filming staff without consent is inappropriate, and we ask that all parties respect members of our staff going about their jobs.

“Evictions are only ever a last resort and we give households in rent arrears every opportunity to resolve the problem, including offering payment plans, before we are left with no choice but to evict. In the last financial year only there were only 189 occasions where we sought an eviction, making up less than 0.3% of our total homes. We cannot just write-off unpaid rent as every pound we fail to reclaim is a pound we cannot invest in improving our homes and building more of the housing London so desperately needs.”

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