It’s time for Kent to build!

Prices are out of reach, waiting lists are growing, and councils are still saying no.

As Kent’s housing crisis becomes ever more acute, there’s only one way out, argues writer and podcaster James O’Malley…

Back in 2008, at the age of 21, I left home for the first time, to live in a house – or more specifically, a room in a shared house – of my own. At the time, I was pretty embarrassed about this. Most of my friends had moved out at 18, making me feel like I was incredibly uncool and late to the party.

However, today the story would be rather different. Last year, it was only by the age of 24 that 50% of people had moved out of their parents’ home, and nationally, 3.6 million people aged between 20 and 34 were still living with a parent.

The reason for this change is not hard to guess: it’s because the cost of living is so damn high. And this goes back to well before the wave of post-pandemic inflation we’re still feeling today.

Here in Kent, for example, the average price paid for a home in 2024 was £400,679 – more than double the price of a home here twenty years ago.

Ebbsfleet, a rare example of construction happening in Kent.

That’s a lot of money – in 2023, the median Kent home cost almost ten times as much as median earnings, and the story is the same everywhere. In Swale, the ratio is ‘only’ 8.15x earnings, and in Tunbridge Wells it is an eye-watering 11.88x. By contrast, when my parents bought their home in the early 1980s, the national ratio was only around 3.6x – something I like to remind them when they complain about my generation having it easy.

Anyway, fundamentally this is why most of the millennial and Gen Z homeowners you know have only managed to buy a home with help, either from rich parents or perhaps a convenient inheritance. And it’s why there are many more millennial families who aren’t so lucky, and are trapped renting or living with parents.

It’s also why the situation is, if anything, even worse for people in social housing – or perhaps more accurately, people who are not yet in social housing, because in 2024 the housing waiting list for Kent and Medway combined was 17,656 households.

So this is all to say that Kent, like the rest of the country, is currently suffering from a profound housing crisis. And this isn’t just a problem for people who need somewhere to live – it’s also at the heart of many of our other problems too.

Why does life feel like such a struggle, even for people in traditionally well-paid, white-collar jobs? Because so much of our income is spent on housing. Why has the British economy been so sluggish for a generation? Because it’s not easy for people to move where there are jobs. And why is there such a stark intergenerational wealth gap? Because baby boomers are a generation of homeowners, and the younger generations are not.

However, there is a solution to Kent’s housing crisis. For as much as we may wish to pretend that the problem is that empty homes are not being used, or that greedy developers are ‘land banking’, or that the crisis can be mitigated through demand-side policies like rent controls, the reality is there is only one path out of this nightmare – and that is for Kent to build.

Time to build

What I describe above might be stark, but it shouldn’t be controversial. The need to build is widely recognised across the political spectrum by national leaders – which is why it is such a focus of the Labour government in Westminster, which is currently in the midst of passing a Planning and Infrastructure Bill to speed up planning approvals.

Nationally, the government has set a housing target of 1.5 million new homes before the next election, which means that Kent needs to build around 13,000 homes a year to keep pace.