[antihero]

These sound utterly bleak and awful. If you want to live in a collective space, just go into a house-share, you can find a nice enough room for £600-800/month. Or if you go further from the centre, you can rent flats etc. I pay £1,000/mo for a single bed with small garden 3 mins walk from Crystal Palace station (though I did get very lucky). My commute is a perfectly pleasant 40 mins to Shoreditch.

The problem is that people seem to want to live right in the centre, whereas if you're on a reliable public transport route (and TfL is fairly reliable). Knowing what areas are awful and which ones are lovely is nice, too.

If you move down towards Greenwich, Sydenham, Peckham, Deptford, New Cross etc there's much better options in much nicer areas, and if you're happy living places with good transport links that are shittier in general you could hit up Stratford, Mile End etc.

Zone 3 seems to be a sweet spot. Then it's £160(ish)/month to get pretty much anywhere by transport.