Homeowners’ dreams are their children’s nightmares

Once a nation of shopkeepers, we must surely now be the nation of homeowners. Actually, it is an even bigger obsession than that. If British secularists were to come up with a new set of seven sacraments for their God-free state, then buying a home would be the highest act of all. Kirstie Allsopp could lead the services.

At least, this seems to be the world of the baby-boomers. For those of us under 30 and still a long way off claiming the keys to our first flat, any enthusiasm for property porn is limited. We are not celebrating the return to rising prices, but mourning.

Now at least we've won one of the baby-boomers over: shadow universities and skills secretary David Willetts in his new book, The Pinch: How the Baby-boomers Took Their Children's Future — And Why They Should Give It Back. Perhaps it took his second brain to see what the rest of his generation has missed: how damaging high house prices are to the young. Many boomers made their fortunes from property, but we — their children — can't afford these mad prices that they inflated.

But as Willetts points out, this is a problem for the original spoilt generation too: "If it is far harder for the young to get started on the housing ladder, they are more dependent on their parents for longer."

Ah yes, the boomerang kids. Whom a host of fiftysomething columnists pledged to boot out of home "for their own good". What these "don't darken my doorway" parents fail to see is that they are the main architects of their children's plight.

Disappointingly for us, the apocalyptic warnings of mega house price falls have so far proved wrong. A few months ago, when I reported Goldman Sachs's prediction that prices would fall another 10 per cent this year, it was with a smug smile. And yet last Friday's figures from Nationwide showed house prices rose by 1.2 per cent last month. By the end of this month, housing analysts say we could be back to double-digit annual growth.

It might be wishful thinking on my part but I don't see this resurgence lasting, particularly with a post-General Election squeeze coming. Even with a further fall, however, prices will remain out of the reach of much of my generation.

But the worst thing the baby-boomers did to us on the housing front wasn't the years they spent driving up prices, it was infecting us with their obsession. At a dinner party last year, median age of guests 25, the conversation turned to the dreaded subject. My best friend — who lives in rental-favouring France — found this hysterical. She is right: we could have broken free from the shackles of seeing success as having a picket fence wrapped round it. Instead, we twentysomethings are likewise embracing this view, even while we can't afford it. Surely, if the global downturn has taught us anything, it is that owning a home is a financial risk, not a sure-fire investment.

But in the long run, the only way is up for prices. A growing population, a rising number of broken families and a shortage of new homes mean that demand should outstrip supply. By then though, I may have joined Kirstie's cult.