Artists confront the indignities of renting and intergenerational warfare

Zoe Pepper's movie Birthright is one of a slew of works by millennial artists that explore the housing crisis. (Supplied: Madman)

Like so many Australians, author Fiona Wright can't resist snooping in an open home.

"You get these glimpses into people's lives that are strangely intimate," she says.

"There's always these little clues that are left about the people who were there and what their lives were like and what they did with their time and what they valued."

It's a pastime that helped Wright pen her first novel, Kill Your Boomers, about 30-something Sydneysider Keira, who is similarly obsessed with real estate.

Kill Your Boomers is littered with vivid descriptions of Sydney, where the housing crisis is "particularly obscene", Wright says. (Supplied: Ultimo Press)

She spends hours scrolling through Domain listings and visiting open homes. But, balancing freelance writing with casual babysitting to scrape together rent each week, owning her own modest home feels totally out of reach.

Over a short period, as research, Wright would visit as many open homes as she could, as long as they were within walking distance of her home in Sydney's inner west.

"I do think it does something to your head though," she says.

"I could feel it making me angrier, but also I started feeling grabby.

"I started feeling a lot more envious and feeling my want more acutely, purely by seeing how many houses and apartments were shifting and moving around me all the time.

"It was mind-blowing that that much commerce was happening so constantly in a sphere from which I was entirely locked out."

Last month's federal budget promised to ease that feeling of being locked out, by making it easier for young people to buy their own home. The federal government announced it intended to do that by reining in negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks, policies that have seen national median house values increase by more than 400 per cent since 1999.

Yet the changes haven't been roundly praised by younger generations. While some bemoan the taxing of their shares, others, like Wright and filmmaker Zoe Pepper, whose movie Birthright is in cinemas now, are tackling the housing crisis through their art.

Wright was a long-term renter when she started writing Kill Your Boomers in 2018, almost as a joke.

"The driving force really was the indignities of renting," she says, describing things like spending more than 12 weeks looking for a place to live and the physical exertion of needing to move house regularly.

According to research from the Actuaries Institute, inequality betwee