The Biggest Lie I Was Told About Owning My Own Home

How do we fix the housing crisis? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series, in which our writers share their experiences of the UK’s dysfunctional housing system and examine how we can fix it.

The cruel bargain of only being able to buy a house when a loved-one dies
The UK’s new rental scandal that no one is talking about
How the van-life generation made homelessness into an aesthetic
The ‘spinster’ housing crisis can no longer be ignored
There’s nothing attractive about being a landlord anymore

For decades, Britain operated on a very simple formula. Work hard, buy a house, watch it go up in value, and eventually use that wealth to retire, help your children, or move somewhere better.

People often talk about education as the great engine of social mobility, but I would argue that for much of modern Britain, housing has been one of the most reliable routes to getting ahead. Not just for the super-rich with their sprawling property portfolios, but for ordinary people. Teachers, shopkeepers, plumbers, small business owners, people like my dad, who spent years working in restaurants. Housing wasn’t just somewhere to live, it was how many people built wealth.

As wages stagnated, pensions became less common (I still need to sort mine out), and the cost of living lurched from one crisis to another, property became Britain’s closest thing to a wealth-building machine for normal people. Buy a home, hold on to it long enough, watch the area become gentrified, wait for a Gail’s to appear, and chances were you’d come out ahead.

That model worked brilliantly for those who got in early – I’m looking at you, baby boomers – and spectacularly badly for everyone who came after.

Every rise in house prices made existing homeowners wealthier on paper, but in the same breath it made buying a home harder for the subsequent generations. At some point, the system stopped being a ladder and became a drawbridge, with normal people drowning in the moat. The very thing that once created social mobility began preventing it.

And now that model appears to be breaking down.

House prices are no longer guaranteed to rise indefinitely. Mortgage rates remain high. Wages have failed to keep pace with housing costs and the cost of living more generally. Affordability has become a huge barrier. My sister is currently buying a flat and has seen sellers slash prices by up to £30,000, sometimes more, because buyers simply aren’t there or have the luxury of waiting.

I’ve gone to viewings with her. Once you’ve seen enough properties, you develop a rough sense of what things are actually worth. And in many cases, sellers are still pricing homes as though we’re living in 2021. The market has moved on. Their expectations haven’t.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly frustrated by the idea that the most valuable thing I own might stop increasing in value. I’m a single female homeowner in London. Like most people, I want financial security. I want the reassurance that comes from knowing my biggest asset is growing rather than shrinking. Frankly, I’d quite like something to help pay for the care home I’ll probably end up in when I’m old and dribbling.

But another part of me, probably the socialist side, thinks this might actually be a good thing. I’ve never been convinced that it’s healthy for a society to depend so heavily on housing wealth in the first place. Somewhere along the line, we stopped treating homes primarily as places to live and started treating them as investment products.

The result is the situation we find ourselves in now. One generation accumulated extraordinary amounts of housing wealth, whilst the generations that followed found themselves increasingly locked out of homeownership altogether. For some young people today, owning a home feels unimaginable.

Even schemes designed to help people onto the property ladder often require incomes that many ordinary workers simply don’t earn. We’ve effectively created a two-tier system between those who own property and those who can barely imagine ever owning one.

That doesn’t mean I’m cheering for ordinary homeowners to lose money. Many people didn’t get rich through property because they were greedy or cynical. They got rich through property because that was the game Britain told them to play. Work hard. Buy a house. Sit tight. For decades, that strategy worked.

The real failure isn’t that house prices might stop rising. The real failure is that we’ve built a society where so many people’s retirement plans, financial security and hopes for the future depend on them rising forever.

If housing wealth is no longer the main route to social mobility, what should be? Personally, I’d rather live in a country where people get ahead through decent wages, genuinely affordable homes, stronger pensions, successful businesses and economic opportunity. A country where prosperity comes from work, innovation and enterprise, rather than simply buying an asset and sitting on it.

A society cannot keep telling one generation that their home is their pension, their savings account, their inheritance plan and their route to prosperity, while telling the next generation they need six-figure salaries and a huge deposit just to get through the front door.

Of course, the homeowner in me wants my flat to go up in value. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But the citizen in me can’t ignore the obvious question: if the only way ordinary people can build wealth is by making housing less affordable for the people who come after them, was that ever really social mobility at all?