The unaffordability of youth

Walk through London on a Friday evening and you’d be forgiven for thinking everything is exactly as it should be – by John Gallaher

The restaurants spill onto pavements, glasses clink outside pubs, and the tube keeps delivering another tide of people into a city that never seems to stop consuming ambition. It still sells itself as the place where careers are made, where the brightest arrive with a suitcase and an unreasonable amount of optimism. London has always demanded something of you. Long hours. Small flats. Endless commutes. But there was once an understanding that, eventually, the city would give something back.

That was the deal. Or at least the one I subscribed to.

You worked your twenties away. You shared houses with strangers. You lived in neighbourhoods that estate agents now describe as “vibrant” but were, in reality, simply the only places you could afford. A quick shout out to my previous article on estate agents… please don’t forget, you are not surveyors. You said no to nights out because payday was still a week away. You accepted that life wasn’t glamorous because you were building towards something. A modest home. A family. Two weeks in Spain every summer, or a whole month for the European readers. Nothing extraordinary. Just a life that felt settled.

Somewhere along the way though, London quietly changed the terms of the contract without telling anyone. Today you can earn what most people would describe as an outstanding salary and still discover you’re locked out of the very milestones that used to define our parents’ adulthood. The figures on your payslip look impressive enough to make relatives outside the capital shake their heads in disbelief. “Our John’s earning five times what I earnt at his age” my parents say. In their heads they imagine cocktails overlooking skyscrapers and weekends spent shopping on the Kings Road. The reality is often a little less cinematic. Rent swallows an astonishing share of your income before you’ve even thought about council tax, train fares, utilities or a weekly food shop that somehow costs twice what it did only a few years ago. The money arrives and disappears with such efficiency that you begin to wonder whether you’re doing something wrong.

The uncomfortable answer is that you probably aren’t. In fact, I’d say I know that you know you aren’t.

This isn’t really about spending habits anymore. We know the old clichés about takeaway coffees and avocado are insulting. As a catholic I think even living with monk-like discipline you could still find yourself watching house prices pull further away every year. Saving for a deposit begins to resemble trying to catch a tube that’s accelerating as you run after it. Unfortunately, I’m not James Bond and can’t catch it once it’s gone.

For many people, home ownership hasn’t become difficult. It has become mathematically implausible.

That’s more than an unsettling shift because owning a home never really meant just the physical presence of a home. It represented permanence. It was the point at which you stopped feeling like a visitor in your own city. It gave you permission to imagine children, to put pictures on the walls without asking someone’s permission, to believe that the life you were building actually belonged to you.Without that certainty, everything else starts moving.

My friends who are couples, recently engaged or somehow married are delaying having children because they don’t know where they’ll be living in three years’ time. Talking of marriage, weddings themselves are becoming smaller because deposits take priority over celebrations. Holidays become an exercise in negotiation, squeezed into whatever remains after another year of rising costs. Even people who have done everything society asked of them, studied hard, found good jobs, climbed career ladders, find themselves quietly lowering their expectations of what adulthood is supposed to look like.

Perhaps that’s the most remarkable thing about modern London. It has managed to make ordinary aspirations feel extravagant. How incredibly unfair is that?

It would be naive of me to say that the city hasn’t stopped creating wealth. In many ways, it has never been richer. But increasingly, that wealth belongs to property itself rather than to the people whose work keeps the city alive. Somewhere over the last three decades, ownership became more valuable than labour. A teacher, a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor can dedicate decades to their profession and still struggle to buy a modest home. Meanwhile a house purchased in the 1990s has often generated more wealth than its owner earned through years of employment.

That changes a society in ways that aren’t immediately visible. (Not to sound like a socialist, in fact that’s the thing that worries me the most).

All this creates a city divided less by income, than by timing. Those fortunate enough to have bought years ago watch the value of their homes climb almost effortlessly, while those arriving later discover that even exceptional salaries no longer buy entry. Two neighbours can earn identical incomes, yet one lives comfortably because they own, while the other spends half their earnings paying someone else’s mortgage. Increasingly, ownership itself feels like an idea from another era.

Instead, renting is beginning to look less like a stage of life and more like its final destination. Institutional landlords are expanding. Build-to-rent developments appear across the skyline. Long-term tenancy is becoming normalised, not because people necessarily prefer it, but because alternatives are disappearing. I don’t wish to shame readers who work in the BTR sector, but I would genuinely struggle to sleep at night knowing what I would be contributing towards if I worked in that role.

I will be honest though, none of this is inherently sinister. So, to the BTR reader, I don’t want to shame you, nor make you feel bad. Renting has always been part of any healthy housing market, and governments have a legitimate role in providing housing for those who need it. But there is another question quietly emerging beneath the surface.

What happens when even people on high salaries find themselves relying on systems they once assumed were designed only as temporary support?

This particular question over time has caused me significant worry and stress. If affordable housing increasingly comes through public provision, and availability determines location, then choice inevitably begins to narrow. Imagine working in central London while the only housing you can realistically access is many miles away because that’s where availability exists. Your commute becomes someone else’s administrative decision. Your ties to friends, family and work slowly become secondary to where accommodation can be found.

I, myself, or those within my age group are suggesting some grand conspiracy. History rarely moves in dramatic leaps. It moves through gradual adjustments that become normal before anyone notices they’ve accepted them. A generation rents for longer. Then permanently. Home ownership becomes something discussed the way previous generations talked about retiring at fifty, pleasant in theory, unrealistic in practice. That’s because cities like London depend on more than buildings and balance sheets. They depend on people believing they have a future there. London still attracts extraordinary talent from across Britain and the world, but attraction is only half the story. A city also has to persuade people they can stay.

If the reward for doing everything right is permanent insecurity, then something far more important than affordability is being lost. The promise that hard work leads somewhere. The confidence to raise children. The belief that tomorrow will feel more settled than today. London remains one of the world’s great cities. Nothing will ever chain my mind on that; I can’t exactly get a cheese bagel at 4am back home. But greatness has never been measured by the number of luxury BTR towers on the skyline. It’s measured by whether ordinary people can build ordinary lives there.

At the moment, for a growing number of people earning what should be more than enough, that is beginning to feel like the most expensive dream of all.

Read more from John Gallagher here at The Springboard Chronicle.