ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½

One of the mystifying things about the social housing sector is that the word "cheap" doesn't seem to appear in its vocabulary. Instead, we hide behind the mealy-mouthed inoffensiveness of "affordable". But "affordable" is a subjective term – a £500,000 mansion in Chelsea is affordable to a City executive, and a nurse on £15,000 would struggle to get a mortgage towards much of the London housing that is marketed as "affordable". All too often, "cheap" gets lumped with its partner-in-cliche "nasty".

It need not be this way. It's time to reclaim cheap. When Stelios Haji-Ioannou launched Easyjet in 1995, he was not short of detractors. It was commonly assumed that people would associate "cheap" with "liable to plunge out of the sky or go bust leaving you stranded in Torremolinos". It was believed that a no-frills service would fail because people liked the movies and plastic cutlery. They were wrong. Easyjet, Ryanair and their ilk keep on expanding while traditional carriers go bust or launch their own "low-cost" brands.

Of course, it's risky transplanting business formulae wholesale from sector to sector. But the Easyjet model has since been successfully applied to car rental, internet cafes and, most recently, cinemas. Also, flying Easyjet has little or no stigma attached to it; in some circles, it has even acquired a sort of raffish cool.

So why can't this be done for housing? The corners to be cut – social housing's "frills" – can be found, but that's a matter of targeting a particular niche. The fact is that although the two-bed semi with garden consistently tops the polls on where people most want to live, that doesn't mean everyone wants to live in one. Young people, for example, who may find themselves in a vulnerable housing situation and on a low income, often say they prefer high-rise, centrally located flats. They tend to prefer smaller kitchens and one bedroom, with a more sizeable space for living, relaxing and working.

There are plenty of examples of this style. The grade II*-listed 1960s buildings of New Hall in Cambridge contain many extremely compact, but basically self-contained, student rooms split into space-saving mezzanines and walls that are nothing more than bare breeze blocks.

While not ideal for young teachers, say, they are a perfect instance of how much can be packed into an extremely limited space. Similarly, there are architect Piercy Conner's much-heralded "microflats", half a dozen other "crash pad" concepts and dozens of Japanese examples. They're all modern, functional, desirable and … well, small and cheap. The same applies to the plans to refit low-demand terraces in Salford and Toxteth as Soho-style "lofts".

So, cheap isn't bad, it just needs to be applied to the right product and marketed to the right people. The first registered social landlord who registers the "cheaplondonflats.com" identity – or something like it – could make a mint, as well as making a lot of 20-somethings extremely happy. Think of those deserted terraces as a young, bohemian community waiting to happen. Inner-city Victorian districts that were headed for demolition in the 1960s have reinvented themselves in the past.The Trellick Tower in west London, once condemned as a high-rise horror, is now a desirable address.

A nice idea, you might be thinking, but it will never happen. However, a glance at Haji-Ioannou's online CV reveals this intriguing hint: Easygroup is investigating low-cost hostels called "Easydorms", and has registered the internet address www.easydorm.co.uk. The future could be bright, and it may well be orange.