The cost of living is often discussed as a question of energy prices, groceries, and wages. But there is an even more fundamental driver persistently pushing up costs for families across Britain: housing costs. The average house now costs eight times more than the median worker’s salary, and that figure rises to eleven times in London.
This is the cost of living crisis at its most basic level: the price of having a secure roof over your head. But the weight of rising housing costs varies by location, too. The price of a home depends greatly, of course, on the city or town where it is located. This is exacerbated by Britain’s long-term failure to build more homes in the areas where people most want to live.
The issue here is that young workers and families are being priced out of living in the areas with access to good jobs and opportunity. Because of this blocker of opportunity, the cost of housing becomes something that harms life chances and living standards. For a three bedroom home, a typical family would need to pay a significantly higher price in outer London than, say, a rural town with poor transport links. In practice, Britain’s house price boom pushes working families ever further from the things that matter to them: family ties, school options and job opportunities. This forces too many workers to make difficult choices between the job they want and a life they can afford.
We built a new dataset and interactive map of house prices per square metre, mapped at the neighbourhood (MSOA) level across England and Wales, to understand where the housing crisis is most acute. The map visualises what is usually hidden behind national house price averages: the local price of space. The map also shows the price history for areas, so you can go back in time and compare house prices all the way back to 2010.
Visualising British cities by house price
Here are some of Britain’s cities, shaded by house price. Take a look at how much greater the price per square metre is across London compared to other cities.
Most of Britain’s big cities follow the pattern of a small core that expands out to many low-cost surrounding areas. London is the real outlier. Its hyper-expensive core expands well past TfL’s Zone 2, and areas continue to be more expensive than the city centres of other British cities far beyond outer London. This massively constrains the choices for people who want (or need) to work in London while owning their own home. This essentially leaves working Londoners who wish to buy a home with three options:
- Live with a long commuting distance from work.
- Buy a small property with insufficient room to have a family.
- Give up and move to a different city altogether.
The question is: can we do better?
What next?
To reverse the trend of people being priced out of opportunity, we need to build more homes in the areas where demand is strongest. Densifying our cities, as the Government’s recent reforms to the NPPF will encourage, is the key to ensuring that access to jobs and services is no longer rationed by the price of space. To find out about some of the ways we can build more homes with popular support, click here.
A huge thank you to Ricky Nathvani, who completed this analysis for YIMBY Alliance. This project relies on data from HM Land Registry and EPC open data.
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