House and Home

Why are so preoccupied with house prices, anyway? The explosion in house prices meant that most younger middle or upper-working-class people stood no chance of living out the middle-aged peak of their powers in properties remotely resembling the ones in which they grew up. "Bricks and mortar" do not, at least ordinarily, constitute an "investment". They constitute a place to live. If we are now being forced back to acknowledging that truth, then about time, too.