How do you solve a problem like the housing crisis? Things are now so bad that the housing charity Shelter declared it an emergency just before Christmas. The number of homeless people is rising and increasing numbers of people are being pushed into the unstable and unaffordable private rented sector because house prices have risen so far beyond wages. The British Dream of owning your own home is well and truly broken for a growing group of people.
Those who have been hit the hardest by all of are low income households and young people. If you’re a millennial – 35 or under – then you came of age just after the financial crash and studies show that your wages took a hit while house prices rose.
Barely a week goes by without a report being published positing potential solutions to all of this. They’re often varying shades of dodgy but one released this week has really pushed the envelope.
Published by think tank the Social Market Foundation the report suggests that people who can’t afford to buy a home of their own should continue house sharing by buying a micro flat or bedroom in a shared space.
More than this, the report explicitly suggests that this could be a solution for childless millennials in particular. The idea is that all the young people without kids can get together – living in tiny bedrooms with showers and sharing communal spaces with others - to ‘free up larger, family-sized homes for those with children who require more space’.
Now, with the number of children in temporary accommodation up 80% since 2007 as well as the number of families caught up in the private renting sector up by 74% in the last decade, this is a noble suggestion. But, the truth is, millennials all over the country are already living in small spaces, shared homes, property guardianships and homes where they’ve converted a living room into a bedroom. This is not out of choice but necessity.
The SMF aren’t actually calling this house sharing, instead they’re labelling this policy suggestion co-living.
How does that old saying go? You can roll a [redacted] in glitter but it’s still a [redacted]?
The problem here is that the so-called solution put forward by the SMF is, in fact, a reiteration of the problems that Generation Rent face.
There is a misconception about Generation Rent, one that, perhaps, informed this report. We tend to think of them as avocado-guzzling recent graduates but, in reality, millennials are growing up. They’re now in their late 20s and early 30s and a recent study found that one third of this demographic will be renting forevershould they be condemned to live with strangers, sharing kitchens, loos and living rooms for decades because successive governments failed to deal with a brewing housing crisis?
The SMF think that co-living properties would not only solve the lack of affordable homes for first-time buyers in Britain’s big cities, ‘foster communities’, ‘tackle loneliness’ and curb demand for social housing.
The private living spaces they suggest which would sit inside co-living blocks would be tiny. They would have showers instead of baths. But all of this would supposedly be offset by cinema rooms, gyms, laundry rooms and, in the more high-end developments, co-working spaces.
I don’t know about you but whenever I’ve lived in a house share all I have wanted is my own space. I have craved it, dreamed of it and even contemplated getting myself into serious debt to find a way of getting it.
The SMF say that the ‘sharing economy’ is creating radical new ways of living and suggest that in the future we could ‘see households increasingly sharing/renting rather than owning items such as power tools which are seldom used’. Given this, they conclude ‘smaller homes may provide a liveable environment, at a lower cost to individuals.
Millennials didn’t invent the sharing economy because they hated owning stuff of their own. They don’t work in the gig economy because they find the idea of having a full-time job with benefits old fashioned. And, by the same token, they don’t live in house shares in adulthood because they want to.
Indeed, research from the Resolution Foundationsuggests the opposite. It found that millennials are more likely to prioritise job security above all else and, actually, move jobs less than Generation X did at our age.
More than this, a survey conducted by the Young Women’s Trustrecently found that one in three young people say their mental health has declined in the past year with almost half of them saying that, next to Brexit, buying a home was the biggest source of worry.
Britain already has some of the smallest homesand most expensive rents in Europe. Is cramming people who can’t afford to buy a home of their own into co-living spaces really the answer? Is this – a slightly glossier, gentrified version of an HMO or property guardianship - really the best we can do? Have millennials not been short changed enough already?