Will I ever be able to afford to buy a house? This is the
question that follows millennials around. For the most part (by no means without
exception), we were born in to pleasant neighbourhoods; our parents offered realistic
deposits and reasonable monthly repayments in exchange for the start of their
adult lives. The total market value of our childhood homes was the same as what
we are now expected to pay as a deposit for our own.
I will begin this post with an anecdote: as touched upon in
previous posts, my mum left Sunderland to join her brothers down south in the
year 2000, bringing with her a toddler, a newborn baby and very little else. At
this stage in her life, she had frugal money from the sale of her and her ex-husband’s
house and a part time administrative role. In spite of this, she was able to
bypass renting almost entirely and secure a new home for the three of us on the
sea front.
Over the course of the next few years, mum worked hard despite
having two young children and ended up acquiring a mortgage for 31 Ash Close (a
3-bed semi in a lovely area, great local schools, transport links, etc). We were
a single parent family and yet even as recently as the millennium we were able
to access affordable housing.
These days, you’d struggle to convince a solicitor that you’d
be able to meet the mortgage repayments even if you did manage to save up the
astronomical deposit. As is painfully clear, if you were a 30-year-old woman
with two dependant children and a modest income from a part-time job it would
be almost impossible.
That is, unless you had a partner. Entering in to a
relationship with someone is no longer propelled by compatible personalities and
physical attraction, it also presents the tantalising prospect of a second income.
In fact, I propose that modern dating and our consumerist world advocates
looking for a mate based primarily on income.
As a young woman, I have been advised on multiple occasions
to ‘marry a rich man’. NOTHING makes my teeth grit more than this comment. Marry
a rich man Charlotte. Don’t even THINK about marrying for love.
Putting the blind fury to one side, it’s got me thinking. Why
do my family and friends think this is good advice? The answer is cold but quite
simple – they want me to have a house and holidays and a ‘nice life’. Without a
solid second income, in the world as it is today, they know that I’ll never be
able to own a beautiful house like the one I grew up in. I’ll have to bring up
my children in rented homes until my parents die. Incredibly bleak.
So, what am I to do? Find a boyfriend with a great income.
Fine. Then what? Move in with him even though I’m not ready because I’m 23 and
getting too old to live at my mum’s?
This is the crux of my observations: in 2020, the housing
crisis is forcing couples to move in together too soon because of financial constraints.
Sadly, I think this naturally leads to more break ups, or worse, settling for
someone long-term who doesn’t make you happy just because they can offer you stability.
I know I have a reputation as a hopeless romantic (Taylor Swift fan, poet,
English grad… the list undeniably goes on), but don’t we all deserve to spend
our best years with a partner that enriches our lives? Don’t we all deserve genuine,
passionate, grinning-like-an-idiot love?
Surely safe shelter is a basic human right. We are the
first generation that doesn’t have (true) access to it. There are vacant
buildings and residual fat cats from generations gone by who own multiple
properties and let them out to us at extortionate prices. We’re on salaries
that mean we can’t rent and save simultaneously. Fuck, most of us can’t even
keep our heads above water most of the time. Even with two incomes it’s a
struggle. But here is my point – under the current government, with one, it is impossible. We move in with our parents or our partners… or we
drown.
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