How To Be Right… in a World Gone Wrong

by James O'Brien

One of the most dispiriting aspects of conversations about house prices and their broader economic consequences is the speed with which the status quo appears to have changed. People from backgrounds similar to my own no longer presume that property ownership is their birthright.

Although why should it be? Maybe mass ownership of one house per small family is the historical exception

If you think I’m exaggerating the gravity of the situation, ask yourself these questions: what happens when all the people currently working and paying rent, stop working? Who will pay to keep a roof over their heads? There are several generations of potential pensioners coming down the tracks who will have nothing to show for their entire working lives. They will conceivably have paid enough rent to pay off two or three mortgages on behalf of their landlords, but will own precisely nothing. They will also, of course, need looking after. But with more and more homes being sold to subsidise the social care of their owners, another grisly spectre emerges: an awful lot of the millennials and younger people who see a far-off inheritance as their passport to property ownership will likely not inherit a bean. I appreciate that I’m often guilty of reaching for portentous comparisons with nineteenth-century society, but where else can the current situation lead but to an ever increasing concentration of wealth in an ever shrinking section of society, coupled with a concomitant catastrophic crisis in social care?