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 scandal of England’s one million empty homesThe UK’s new rental scandal that no one is talking aboutHow the van-life generation made homelessness into an aestheticThe ‘spinster’ housing crisis can no longer be ignoredThere’s nothing attractive about being a landlord anymore
I grew up assuming I’d own a home one day. Not a mansion. Just a modest flat. Perhaps a nice one-bed on a pleasant, tree-lined street somewhere. That seemed reasonable.
It seemed reasonable because that’s what I’d seen. Every adult I knew owned a house – my parents, their friends, my aunts and uncles. And all of them were working class: mechanics, bus drivers, hairdressers, shopkeepers. Nobody had inherited wealth or done anything spectacular. They’d just worked, saved, and got on the ladder by their mid-twenties. And I fully expected to do the same.
I knew house prices had increased since my parents’ generation, but I had something they hadn’t: a university degree. I was the only one in my family to receive an education past the age of sixteen. That felt like progress and I assumed I would earn enough in my new career to get on that property ladder.
I graduated in 2000 and my partner at the time and I moved to Brighton, which felt like the right place to be in our twenties. But it turned out to be something of a trap. We were frugal, but high rents and low wages made it impossible to save anything substantial. The deposit required to buy a flat was growing faster than anything we could put aside. We talked about relocating to somewhere more affordable, but we could never quite make the logistics work.
The relationship ended in 2006 and for the first time in my adult life I was single and renting alone. The financial pressure doubled overnight. By the time I turned 30 in 2008, it was clear that no amount of working and saving was going to buy a home.
With no serious commitments and no real sense of stability, I decided to lean into the one opportunity that was left: mobility and spent the next several years teaching in Southeast Asia. It was a nice quality of life, but any hope of owning a home required a career upgrade, so I came home and invested some of my savings into postgraduate qualifications and focused on that.
My parents, meanwhile, had their own housing frustrations. They were living in a bungalow near Manchester which was so small we called it “the rabbit hutch”. It was a shared ownership retirement property that promised maintenance support but rarely delivered.
For a long time the idea of buying a house together remained little more than a casual conversation. But when the pandemic hit, we discussed it more seriously. We needed somewhere large enough for three adults, preferably in a quiet, rural location. That was simply out of reach in the UK.
It was mum who started looking into Ireland. It ticked a lot of boxes. Even after Brexit, British citizens retain the right to work and buy property. In October 2021, we put in an offer on a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house on an acre of land. We paid €170,000 – roughly £150,000. Timing was everything. Had we waited much longer we might have missed our chance. Rural Ireland is still cheaper than most of the UK, but the gap has narrowed significantly since then.
My parents bought it outright using the proceeds from their bungalow, but we put our three names on the paperwork (as an only child, the inheritance question was simple). The money I’d managed to save was kept back for other expenses and as a financial buffer.
We each have a modest income – my parents through their pensions and me through my job – and we split the bills between us. As my parents get older, I expect to take on more of the practical responsibilities. Hopefully, we’ll never need to think about nursing home costs because I’m happy to provide care when the time comes. I don’t see that as a burden. If anything, it feels like the point of our set up.
Living together across generations requires negotiation, patience, and a shared sense of humour. Thankfully we have all three. What it gives us is security, company, and a quality of life none of us could have managed alone.
Western society has spent decades selling us the idea that adulthood means your own front door. But for most of human history, and in much of the world today, living together across generations wasn’t a last resort — it was just how family life worked.
The housing crisis won’t be solved by any one thing, and intergenerational living won’t suit everyone. But it’s an option worth considering, and the benefits go well beyond the financial. I finally found a place to call home. It just doesn’t look like the one I’d expected.
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