Housing blues

I'm very concerned that young people are finding it so hard to buy a home because of the stratospheric property prices, and many still live with their parents because they can't afford to either buy or rent.

I've been lucky enough to end up owning a large detached house, but if I'd had less luck I could have been struggling to find somewhere to live in my old age and making do with a run-down flat in some seedy neighbourhood.

In my twenties I was living in a run-down flat in London and wondering how on earth I could afford somewhere more desirable. I was saving money but although I had about enough for the deposit on a flat, a mortgage was quite unaffordable.

I was lucky enough to run into Jenny and between the two of us we were able to buy a tiny flat. As a result of rapidly rising property prices we were able to sell up at a profit and move into a bigger flat.

When we moved to Belfast in 2000 we sold our London flat for an even larger profit and were able to buy a house here for cash, as local house prices are much lower than in London.

Then with a large windfall from my mother we were able to buy our present house, where we've lived for almost 15 years.

But I'm always aware of the many thousands of youngsters who aren't as lucky as us and are desperate for a decent home of their own. The politicians seem unable to control the endlessly rising rents and house prices and just let them get higher. Now only the seriously wealthy can afford a sizeable house in the big cities.

Home sweet home? Only if you're lucky enough to have one.

Bricks and mortar

Given the current housing crisis, dating youngsters are said to be paying more attention to the housing situation of their dates. Which may seem rather unromantic, but it's something that looms large nowadays.

Unless your only concern is whether you love each other, how compatible you are, and how likely you are to stay together, and you absolutely refuse to think about such practical issues as bricks and mortar, then housing is bound to come up sooner or later.

Does your date own a flat or house? Are they planning to? Do they have enough funds to do so? Or are they easily affording a hefty flat rental?

Such considerations weren't so pressing when I was young and dating. If you gave the matter any thought at all, you assumed your date was happily housed somewhere and able to afford whatever it cost.

I hardly gave a moment's thought to housing when I was dating, and neither did my parents, even though parents generally were often very curious about a prospective mate's financial status and future prospects.

When I met Jenny we were both working in bookshops. Although our salaries were low, we assumed we wouldn't have any trouble renting and subsequently buying a flat or house. At that time this was such a reasonable assumption that we barely discussed it. Since then of course both rents and property prices have sky-rocketed and salaries have declined.

So it's not surprising that the practicalities of where you and your loved one might live, and whether you can possibly afford it, often comes up.

Not very romantic but hard to avoid.

Driven out

For some years now there have been angry complaints from people in more desirable parts of the country that their children are being driven out of the area by wealthy incomers pushing up property prices to levels the locals can no longer afford.

Politicians are taking all sorts of counter-measures but none of them seem to have much effect, and the proliferation of expensive second homes and holiday homes in attractive areas continues apace.

It seems to me that as long as outsiders can afford hefty prices for local homes, and as long as residents can enjoy a large profit by selling up, the trend to "colonise" picturesque villages and towns - and appealing parts of cities - can only continue.

I think the politicians who are trying to turn back the tide are onto a losing battle, but they're reluctant to make the obvious suggestion - that if the locals can no longer afford the rocketing house prices, then there's actually nothing wrong with moving some place where property is cheaper.

After all, that's what Jenny and I did, and it's worked out very well for us. We gave up on Islington, one of the most expensive parts of London, because we couldn't afford to move from a flat to a house. We sold our flat and left for Belfast, where we were able to buy a semi-detached house for cash, with plenty of money left over.

A lot of Londoners defeated by the property prices are now heading for cheaper cities and towns where not only are houses affordable but the quality of life is better - less congestion, a slower pace, friendlier people and lots of nearby beauty spots. Often they wonder why they didn't make the move much earlier.

Being driven out could be a blessing in disguise.

Hard work

It's a well-worn cliché that only hard work will get you what you want in life. But it's also a load of bollocks. Hard work might get results, or it might get you precisely nothing.

There are plenty of people out there sweating away day after day with little to show for it. All the money's going to their bosses or their landlord or their season ticket and they struggle to make any real improvements in their life.

Other people lie on their yachts all day and do nothing but watch the money pour in from their various investments and property empires. Their only hard work is tying their shoelaces.

I must admit I've done very little hard work in my life. I've been lucky enough to have fairly leisurely jobs with plenty of time for chatting and fooling around. The only serious exertion was the start of the academic year at a university bookshop, humping hundreds of weighty textbooks into the shop and trying to keep up with the deluge of impatient students and their voluminous booklists (that was in the pre-internet, pre-Wikipedia days of course). It was pure bedlam.

What wealth and comfort I've acquired has been almost entirely through luck rather than hard work. Constantly rising property prices, especially in London, and an unexpected windfall from my mum. Or to put it another way, being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people.

I suppose you could also say I haven't squandered all my money on drink or drugs or gambling or hookers. If you have any kind of expensive addiction, then any amount of hard work, however well it's paid, won't bear much fruit.

I was reading only today that the average income for a writer is now about £11,000 a year. You can sit in front of your pc for decades, laboriously cranking out page after page of hard-won creativity, and have only a massive overdraft as your reward.

Listening to all these millionaire government ministers urging us all to solve our problems by working a bit harder is pretty sickening. I'd like to see them scrubbing a few floors on their hands and knees. That'll be the day.

Mud huts to mortgages

Don't you think the whole business of finding a home has gone backwards rather than forwards? At one time all you had to do was build yourself a house and you lived in it and owned it and that was that. Now most of us can only get a house by paying someone huge amounts of money - and we may not own it either.

Gone are the days of the humble mud hut or tepee. Now houses are so elaborate most people simply don't have the skills to build one. So we have to rely on someone else to do it and they charge us monstrous sums for the privilege.

Instead of just relaxing and enjoying our home, we have to spend years sweating and toiling to pay the rent or the mortgage. Is this really the height of civilisation? Or is it more like some modern form of slavery in which we are permanently in hock to someone else?

I know that in return for all this cash we may have very comfortable, very well-furnished homes with all mod cons - a far cry from a rudimentary shack with no running water or toilet or electricity. But hasn't something gone seriously wrong here, that a bit of domestic comfort has such a high price attached to it?

Of course homes might be a lot cheaper if it wasn't for the property price phenomenon - house prices going up and up seemingly without end because there are never enough to go round and because it's so prestigious to own your own home.

If it wasn't for that, house prices might even be affordable, instead of costing umpteen times the average wage. As it is, we're now stretching ourselves to our financial limits and beyond, with thousands of homes being repossessed every year.

The housing situation has gone from odd to completely insane and there seems to be little we can do about it. Home Sweet Home? These days, more like Home Sweet Ball and Chain.