I'm Gen Z and can't afford to move out of my family home. People of my generation need action now

You go to school, you go to university, you get a cushy office job in London or Manchester, you do exactly what you’re told to reach the final step, home ownership.

Because that’s the deal, right? Play by the rules, and eventually, you’ll earn the prize: a home of your own. Your name on the postbox. A kitchen you can paint whatever colour you like. No landlord telling you can’t hang things on the walls. A home office. A stable life.

But for so many of us in Gen Z, that ending feels less like a destination and more like a mirage. No matter how strictly we follow the script, homeownership feels further away than ever, unreachable, unaffordable, almost laughably idealistic. With rent prices through the roof and bills climbing higher every month, there’s barely anything left to save, let alone put toward a deposit.

Between 2009 and 2022, house prices rose about twice as fast as our wages. The government defines an affordable home by paying less than 30% of your income on rent. But the latest stats on this from the Office for National Statistics has found that, on average, renters spend over 36% of their income on rent, while in London this rises to over 42%. It’s no wonder half of private renters have no savings whatsoever, while Generation Rent’s analysis found the average time it would take a single person to save for a deposit in London is now over 50 years.

Imagine studying for a degree for three or four years, going against the grain of this current job market and actually landing a job, only for your landlord to swallow nearly half your income. “Rat race” feels like a euphemism.

The numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the entire truth. I believe if there were no housing crisis at all, my life would look shockingly different. I chose to give up renting during university. I have lived at my parents’ council home instead. Though my pockets are fuller, there are limitations. Having to answer to my mum if I come back after a certain time, for a start! It’s these decisions that many young people are forced into making for themselves, in fact, living at home has increased by more than a third over the past two decades.

That loss of self-determination might seem trivial, but over time, it chips away at you. How much personal growth is being stifled across an entire generation simply because the price of renting is too high? What about the people who never left home at all, who never got to learn how to live on their own, or argue with their landlord over broken boilers? What happens to your sense of self, when you’re forced to stay in the same bedroom you grew up in?

Even those who do manage to rent aren’t exactly thriving. A friend of mine has had to move more than 20 times in the 26 years they’ve been alive, constantly uprooted by soaring costs, short-term tenancies and sudden evictions. The emotional toll of that instability is enormous: chronic anxiety, burnout, and a deep sense of disconnection from any idea of “home”.

The housing crisis I feel has guided the arrested development Gen Z’s like me find ourselves in, telling ourselves we’re not adults until we’re 25, or arguing that our 30s is when we truly come into being. Just a short time ago, the TV show Cheers depicted people in their 30s as old, balding and haggard. Now, people in their 30s are watching Charli XCX, licking the Glastonbury stage floor while a heavy bass gnaws in the background.

Read more:

• ‘I was not built for the nine-to-five lifestyle’: Why so many Gen Z workers have a side hustle
• Rise of the good landlords: Inside the movement to make the private rental sector tackle homelessness
• Keir Starmer writes for Big Issue: ‘It’s about time we rebalanced the system to give renters more power’

Without homes to call our own, moving in and out of places based on whatever a landlord thinks, being stuck in the bedrooms we were raised in has created a generation trying to lull itself out of reality.

The impact of this is wider than economics, its generation-defining. Politicians have ignored the issue of affordable rents for a long time.

This is why we need limits on how much landlords can raise the rent, to stop them from constantly ringing us of any money we’ve got. Though the government has promised to build 1.5 million new affordable homes, by the time that happens, Gen Z would have become old news.

People of my generation need solutions now. We literally cannot afford to wait any longer

Bismah Naqui is communications officer at Generation Rent.

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