On Owning Property

The massive desire to own your own home and the belief that this is so important is something I’d ascribe to Margaret Thatcher. I might even term it her ‘last laugh’ but then there are so many other legacies it would seem pointless: I wasn’t cognitive of the time before her arrival but I grew up in her shadow and watched as her policies drove a wedge between people of a certain wealth and those above it, making the poor that much poorer. I will admit, perhaps grudgingly, that her policies probably had good in the bad, that the prosperity we have now is down to things she did; most of politics seems to be about benefiting some part of society while harming another rather than having an objective good or bad.

Still there are ways to be ‘rich’ that aren’t financial and I’m not talking about letting Jesus into your life here. I think Thatcher’s Britain resulting in a more selfish society, an angrier and more divided one and I’m not sure that was a good price to pay to allow me to type this on my laptop. I like the trappings of modern society but then my IT job ensures that I’m more of a beneficiary than some. One of the biggest examples of the lucre-driven society she drove is the obsession with property ownership.

I should make it clear that I’m not claiming anyone who owns their own house or has a mortgage is in some way a selfish and nasty individual, or even subscribes to Thatcher’s politics. She believed that being a person of property was important, however, and did her best to make this way open to anyone and I think maybe that changed people’s perceptions. In the 90s the housing boom quickly got out of the hand and left tonnes of people unable to get a foot in the door by the turn of the century. I consider myself one of those ‘unfortunates’ and those I know of my generation who did end up owning somewhere either didn’t go to university or their parents were forced to dig deep into their own savings to finance the deposit.

More recently the market has become so strained that anyone claiming there will be a crash gains immediate media attention as the first-time buyers await the opportunity to get on the property ladder the way those with any capital after the crash at the turn of the 90s were able to. These reports of an impending crash seem to have been going for about 10 years and the recent Northern Rock affair caused many people to start hoping this would signal the beginning of the end and that their time to use those savings to snap up a bargain house were coming. Watching people hope that others were about to suffer is never fun, though so far things still look pretty stable.

These days the need for affordable housing for key workers is the latest joke foisted upon us, a sad result of the desire for everyone to own property, as if there was nothing better in the world than tying yourself down to a loan for the vast majority of your working life. As ever we are informed that rent money is ‘wasted’ but then maybe life should be about living rather than trying to keep it all while you’re young and then hoping to spend it in your dotage when your chances of actually enjoying it are lower.

I have come to realise I really don’t care about owning a property. Unless I am suddenly able to win the lottery without entering or get a job that pays the GDP of a third world country, the only mortgage I’d get would take 40-odd years to pay off and, assuming I live to the age of 70, I’m probably going to have to sell it to pay for nursing homes as I slip quietly into the hereafter. Of course, if there is a crash, I’ll be first in the queue for a cheap house, thanks.