By Tim Murgatroyd

One of my favourite feelings in life is pulling up outside my house after a day at work, taking out my keys and stepping into a place I can truly call home. It’s a feeling many people take for granted and, I must admit, most of the time I’m one of them.

After all, a home of your own is essential for our sense of well-being as human beings. That’s why so many TV programmes are based around the idea of the places people live. Not to mention décor and furnishings – let’s face it, we often see our homes as an extension of ourselves, a statement of our place in the community and wider world.

We constantly adapt and perfect our living environment because for most people their home is more than just their castle, a place of refuge. It is the stage upon which families are raised and loves lived out. Housing matters fundamentally.

Is it just me who looks at the current housing crisis in the UK, and especially York, with a sense of deep concern?

First, the facts. In York we have entered a perfect storm when it comes to housing. Those aspiring to buy (and that’s most of us) have to contend with a double whammy of very high house prices and a low wage economy for far too many of our city’s hardworking citizens.

According to Right Move the average price of a home in York is £263,894. In the past year house prices rose nine per cent on the year before and 19 per cent up on 2014, when they averaged £221,531.

Yet a recent council report (The Press, January 16) showed that in 2016, average wages in York were £505.40 a week – far less than the £540.20 average for the whole of Great Britain.

York Press:

Bricks and mortar: new housing at Derwenthorpe. We badly need more homes that people can afford, says Tim Murgatroyd

Of course, averages can be misleading. But for the majority of young people, getting on the home ownership ladder is simply a pipe dream. That’s why they have been dubbed ‘Generation Rent’. And that includes well-qualified young people doing hugely responsible jobs like teachers or nurses, as well as highly skilled tradespeople or workers in the private sector.

As for the thousands of our fellow citizens, young and old, working on zero hour contracts and the misnamed Living Wage, a basic grasp of mathematics reveals they are excluded from home ownership.

The alternative for most is private renting and according to recent figures 26 per cent of housing in York is now privately rented. In 2016 the average price of a private rented house was £988 a month and there is competition for such properties between local residents and the student population who bring so many benefits to our city.

As for social housing, there is simply not enough available. The right to buy and decades of insufficient building of council or housing association homes mean that according to council figures there are 1,600 households on the waiting list for an affordable home. That means families with children as well as single people.

In such a situation it is little surprise homelessness is rising both in York and the rest of the UK. According to research carried out by the housing charity Shelter, hundreds of thousands of people are homeless in the UK, causing pointless and wholly avoidable misery. And those figures don’t include huge numbers of the so-called “hidden homeless” struggling in overcrowded, insecure housing.

In short, the housing situation in Britain and York is profoundly dysfunctional. Older generations, including my own, never faced such problems in setting up a family home.

That is what is at stake here: real families and their life chances. Anyone who has raised kids knows a comfortable home with adequate rooms certainly helps for domestic harmony.

I sincerely hope the political parties competing for our votes at the general election on June 8 offer us concrete, costed policies for turning our housing crisis around.

We need a housing policy that is ambitious in its desire to provide affordable homes for ordinary people, not just luxury apartments for investors or the wealthy.

We owe it to ourselves and the next generation to get building now. For life.