Meet the young families stuck in their starter homes thanks to the UK housing crisis | Kirsty Major
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The arrival of a child is a good a reason as any to upsize, but this is no longer an option for many ‘second steppers’. When Ronan and his wife lived as property guardians in Walthamstow, east London, owning a place of their own seemed out of their reach. But in 2018, an opportunity presented itself: a development offering compact one-bedroom flats at a discounted price to people living in the local community.
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The couple had no plans to start a family and the flat seemed suited to their lifestyle and budget. Then plans changed, as they often do, and they gave birth to a baby boy four years after moving in. Overnight, the bedroom doubled as a nursery and the open-plan living space functioned as a kitchen, dining room, living room and playroom. For lack of space, the pram was parked outside in the communal corridor. Soon, complaints landed in their inbox from the building management company stating that it posed a fire risk.
It was time to move on, take the equity they had built up and use it to put a deposit down on a bigger place in their neighbourhood. This, it turned out, was easier in theory than practice. They could sell their property for about £300,000, based on their last valuation in 2020, but the lowest asking price for a fixer-upper two-bed terrace house was £500,000. This time around there would be no stamp duty relief, no help-to-buy Isas or equity loans.
Even if they scrabbled a deposit together, they were unsure whether they could manage such a large mortgage, given the rise in interest rates: “Our mortgage is already a stretch for us.” Five years ago, the average five-year fix was 2.4%; in 2024, it is 4.4%. Add nursery fees (often the price of another mortgage) and increasing utility bills, and it’s not hard to see why families are unable to bear the financial cost of moving.
