The latest Office for National Statistics figures are in, and they confirm what many of us already suspected: the British housing crisis has turned a generation into permanent lodgers in their parents’ spare rooms. One in four young adults now lives with their parents, the highest proportion since records began. This is not a market correction.
This is a cultural collapse. We are witnessing the slow, inexorable death of the idea that adulthood is defined by independence. In Victorian times, a young man who lived with his parents past the age of twenty-one was considered a failure.
Today, he is merely a statistic. The comparison to Rome is almost too easy. In the late Empire, the patron-client system trapped young men in dependency, unable to break free of familial or political obligations.
Sound familiar? Our modern patrons are mortgage lenders and buy-to-let landlords. The clients are the graduates shuffling back to their childhood bedrooms, diplomas in hand, dreams deferred.
The government’s response has been predictably tepid: a few tweaks to stamp duty, some platitudes about building homes. But this is not a housing crisis. It is a crisis of national character.
We have become a nation of Peter Pans, unwilling or unable to grow up. The boomerang generation is not a demographic quirk. It is a verdict on a society that has lost faith in the future.
And until we rediscover the virtues of ambition and self-reliance, we will continue to produce adults who are children in all but legal age.
