Home ownership is an impossible dream – so why worry?

I recently read an Evening Standard story bemoaning the lot of a couple with a joint yearly income of £80k unable to get a mortgage. The couple are saving £760 a month but shouldering £1,200 a month rent, £330 in bills and loans of £400. It sounds grim but then you read that they live in Battersea, hardly the cheapest area to choose. The article makes great play of the fact the couple is "cutting down on luxuries in an effort to get a foot on the housing ladder". The biggest luxury is the one they're the least likely to want to give up – living in a desirable area of London, or even London itself. As the coalition's housing policy prepares to sweep the poor out of many parts of the capital, it's hard to shed a tear for a well-paid couple making arguably foolish financial choices. A newly released report from the British Bankers' Association says mortgaging lending is at a 10-year low. To snag a first home in London costs in the region of £260,000 with a deposit of £65,000. With average earnings of £21,000, Londoners in their 20s will need at least five years to squirrel away a deposit. That's tough isn't it? But the rest of the country shouldn't be expected to shed a tear. I am 26 years old, and I'm already four years older than my mother was when she and my dad got their first mortgage. I have virtually no savings, certainly nowhere near the amount I'd need to get a mortgage. But should I really be that bothered? British society has an obsession with property ownership that other nations don't necessarily have. With the property ladder still at an unassailable height for me, should I bother trying to climb it at all? My parents got their first home, a bungalow in Norfolk, with the help from the Royal Navy. My dad was a medic who served during the Falklands, my mum was a wren. The two previous generations of my family also had help. My grandfather was in the Metropolitan police and got a low-interest rate on his mortgage offered to public sector workers. The generation above that also had help. My maternal grandmother's parents lived in a house owned by the Electricity Board. They rented for many years but eventually were given the opportunity to own that home. Essentially, they benefited from an early form of today's rent-to-own schemes. I'm a freelance writer. My income yoyos wildly and I'd be lucky to get a mortgage even if I did have the money for a deposit. But I'm becoming less and less obsessed with this idea of securing a fortress of my own. Craving a bijou flat in Battersea isn't on my agenda – I may as well wish for a mortgage on a Martian space colony. It is not going to happen without a serious change in life circumstances. Some of my acquaintances disagree. My friend Adam, a freelance web consultant, always says that he'd like to have the luxury to make some mistakes: put up a bad set of shelves, hang some wonky wallpaper. That's the way his dad learned how to do all that. It's not easy in a rented house. Other countries have an entirely different philosophy to home ownership. My half-Irish/half-German girlfriend, Danni, represents the two schools of thinking. While 68% of British households own their homes, only 67% of Germans rent their homes with property ownership in Berlin the lowest in the nation, at 13% . Growing up in Germany, she never got the sense that owning land or property was all that important. She knew her family paid rent, but all the furniture was theirs and they could decorate their home as they liked. For the Irish-side of her family it's entirely different – Ireland has home ownership rates of 80% . She says: "I think property is so important to Irish people because, historically, we weren't allowed to own our own land for such a long time. We were tenant farmers dependent on landlords and that was partly behind the ridiculous property boom of the 90s and early 00s." Despite the restrictive nature of the British rental market, that's where I'll be finding my homes for the foreseeable future. The lust for Ikea trips and the ability to paint your own front door is outweighed for me by the sheer amount of money I'd need to persuade the bank to take a chance. It's an impossible dream and most probably a practical nightmare.