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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Rosie Collington

How co-operative housing gave me the peace of mind I thought I’d never find

Residential flats in Copenhagen, Denmark, February 2020
Residential flats in Copenhagen, Denmark, February 2020 Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Like many of my millennial peers, I believed that I would be stuck in a doom-loop of precarious housing for ever, handing over huge portions of my income every month to a landlord who happened to own the floor I was sleeping on.

Across many countries, and big cities in particular, the prospect of homeownership or access to socially rented housing is a pipe dream. Median house prices have risen to more than seven times median incomes in the Anglo-Saxon economies. In the UK, the proportion of 25- to 35-year-olds on middle incomes who owned a home plummeted from two-thirds to just one-quarter between 1996 and 2016. Meanwhile, the costs of renting, from Sydney to San Francisco, have soared.

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