A Plan for York

For those with lower incomes it has become almost impossible to buy their own home in York. For the lowest quarter of income earners they must now find 10 times their salary – while in the 1970s it was only 3.5 times.

Since 1970s average rents have risen from £268 per month (inflation adjusted) to over £850 per month, meaning a greater proportion of York residents find rents unaffordable.

In the 1970s, home ownership was a ladder that most people started climbing in their early 20s. In the 2020s, home ownership has become a “waiting game,” where the largest share of the city’s housing wealth is held by the elderly, while younger residents remain in the rental sector for a decade longer than their grandparents did.

We have moved from a society where you “earned” your way into property wealth during your middle years, to one where you “wait” for it via inheritance or long-term asset holding in your later years.

House price increases have caused York to transition from a city of “Side-by-Side Classes” (where workers and managers lived in different streets but within the same ward) to a city of “Generational Enclaves,” where the centre belongs to the wealthy and the transient, and the outskirts house a dwindling population of local mortgage-holders.

A homeowner in York who bought in the 1980s has seen their property wealth grow by hundreds of percent purely through market inflation—a “passive” gain that a young worker today cannot replicate through “active” saving.

The lower quarter median income in York is now £21,200 so the cheapest of these houses would give an affordability ratio of 13.9. This and the small number of affordable houses that are being made available (21 per year) means that York Council’s policies on affordable housing are having little effect on the cost of housing in York.