How housing has divided the youngOver the past 25 years only a small group of young adults have been able to get on to the property ladder – and this has been getting smaller. To get more housing news, you can visit shine news official website. A result of rapidly rising house prices, this trend has led to concerns that younger generations will never be as wealthy as their parents. Home ownership among the young has fallen across all income groups. Indeed, among the top fifth – those with a family income of £41,000 a year after tax – the proportion of those aged 25 to 34 who own a home has fallen from 85% 20 years ago to 65% now. This is the same proportion as that for middle-income earners – those who would now have a family income of £22,200 to £30,600 after tax – 20 years ago. The decline among this middle-income group has been even greater, with just 27% now homeowners. And the proportion drops to just 8% among those on less than £15,080, who make up the bottom fifth in terms of income. In other words, rising house prices have seen home ownership become increasingly the preserve of not just older generations but also the better-off among the young. About 40% of young homeowners have household incomes in the top fifth of their age-group – up from 30% in the mid-1990s. What has happened to explain such a huge change in a relatively short period of time? The main reason is that house prices rose rapidly during much of the 1990s and 2000s. Accounting for inflation, house prices have risen by almost 160% since the mid-1990s while young people’s incomes have grown by only 23%. This means that fewer and fewer can afford to get on the housing ladder. This gulf can essentially explain all of the fall in the home ownership rate over the past 20 years, analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests. A country dividedOf course, there are a wide variety of experiences within any generation and these housing trends have not affected all young people equally. Over the past 20 years, these large falls in home ownership have been seen among young people across the country. But some places have fared much better than others. The biggest falls in home ownership have been in south-east England, where house prices rose especially steeply. Twenty years ago, 64% of 25- to 34-year-olds in this area owned a home, a figure that has now halved, to just 32%.