Ask your grandparents when they bought their first home and the answer will probably shock you. In the UK today, the average first-time buyer is almost 34 years old, two years older than before the pandemic, and the typical home in England now costs around 7.6 times a full-time salary. For a whole generation, the simple idea that you work hard, save up and buy a place of your own has quietly stopped being true.

So most young people rent instead, and renting is no bargain either. The average UK renter now hands over about 41% of their take-home pay to a landlord, which leaves very little to save. The result is the so-called "Bank of Mum and Dad": in 2025, more than half of first-time buyers got help from family, some 8.3 billion pounds in gifts and loans. Increasingly, whether you own a home depends less on what you earn and more on what your parents can give you.

If buying is out of reach, maybe the answer is to change where and how we live. One idea catching on across Europe is the "15-minute city", dreamed up by the urbanist Carlos Moreno in 2016 and championed by the mayor of Paris from 2020. The thinking is simple: everything you need for daily life, shops, schools, work, a doctor, a park, should be a short walk or cycle from your front door. Home stops being just four walls and becomes a whole neighbourhood.

Underneath the numbers sits a bigger question. Is a home a basic right, a reward for hard work, or simply wherever you happen to be able to afford? We say home is where the heart is, and that is a lovely thought. But the heart still needs a roof over it, and right now, for a lot of people, that roof has never felt further away.