Eva Wiseman

Since when was an affordable rent the stuff of our dreams?

The first time I saw a house as a competition prize I laughed. What a thing, I thought! What a thing! I kept my eye out for more, and over the years they multiplied, the competitions now a little industry in themselves, newspaper pieces written about the winners, photographs of happy couples standing in the driveways of newbuilds holding large silver suitcases of cash. My friends enter the competitions wryly, ruefully, as if chucking coins into a fountain, why not?

Last week there was a big magazine piece where young New Yorkers were interviewed about their dream lives, then, looking at real estate listings and school fees and takeaway prices, calculated exactly how much such a life would cost. I am what I kindly choose to describe as a curious person – someone who peers quite deeply into lighted windows and the lives of others, and who subscribes to a number of publications that focus almost exclusively on walking the reader around strangers’ fabulous homes – so this magazine piece gripped me. While many of my friends find this practice (which includes time spent staring glazily at estate agents’ websites) vaguely sickening and morally weak, it relaxes me – I’m comfortable in that cold water, the vast moat between how we live, and how we thought we would.

But in this piece, the sobriety and simplicity of the young people’s fantasies made me pause: it was a twobed flat they wanted, good eyebrows, a cat. I thought about what I might have said, were I 20 years younger. First, I would’ve clarified the boundaries – in this future reality, can we fly, for instance. Is age still a thing? What’s the temperature in July, in this reality? Have the rich been eaten yet? And then, of course, I would have gone quite wild, filling my virtual shopping basket with all manner of communal mansions, all manner of little goat fields, and a full-time pastry chef, and a scented candle sommelier, and a cashmere allowance, and special tunnels to connect all my friends’ houses, and so on.

At first, it baffled me that these interviewees had not pushed for similar, instead fantasising about “maintaining a suburban lawn” or renting a two-bed flat, or “pasta and boardgame nights”. Nobody wanted three boyfriends and hair like Marilyn. Nobody wanted a sex dungeon, or regular injections of an 18-year-old’s blood. But then I remembered the house competitions and realised how far everyone’s dreams have fallen. Once we wanted to go to the moon. Once we wanted a lifetime supply of pink gummy bears. When I was at college my flatmate, Tim, showed me a competition in the Daily Sport, where readers could apply for the chance to wear Page 3 girl Lindsey Dawn Mckenzie’s tits as a hat. Now we just want somewhere safe to sleep.

Did it start with “right to buy”? Did it start when the welfare state started to be dismantled, its parts getting lost in the process like little Ikea screws? Everything was given a price. And today, as that price rises and rises, many are struggling to afford to pay for even their most basic needs – heat, food, home. The cost of living, this horrible phrase, which at one point might have been interpreted as referring to such things as heartbreak or anxiety or boredom or grief, today is blunt and cold and talks about survival. It means: this is the price of staying alive. And it means young people don’t waste a fantasy on meeting Beyoncé or racing a car, they want simply: stabilised rent, hot food, a garden, somewhere maybe to go dancing on Saturdays.

The prospect of a home of their own is the wildest a dream gets for younger people (and many old ones, too). But this is a generation who’s been prevented from growing up – 4.9 million people in England and Wales under the age of 34 are living with their parents. As housing journalist Vicky Spratt reported last week, younger generations have been infantilised by bad policy. People are living with their parents because of a historic rise in house prices, and average asking rents passing £1,000 a month outside London for the first time, a record. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, “Unless you have wealthy parents who can help you buy a home of your own,” wrote Spratt, “you are now three times less likely to do so by the age of 30.” This marks a shift, “A narrowing of choices for anyone who relies on income as opposed to inheritance. It signals that there is less mobility in this country today.” It signals that it is harder to grow up and it is harder to live.

The idea of paying to enter competitions knowing one ticket in a million might win you a house is the psychological sibling to the idea of paying interest on a mortgage, or paying a landlord rent. We see nothing, we own nothing, we pour our coins into the water and hope brightly for the best. It would be a shame, though, if we forgot how to dream. How to construct a fantasy out of velvet and air, beyond our basic quotidian needs to the castles and diamonds and dungeons beyond.