‘It’s hard not to feel like a failure’: Meet the Homeagainers ‘the cost of living kids’ forced to move back in with mum and dad
Ellie* was reticent at first. A 31-year-old, successful entrepreneur who’d built a business from the ground up, she was hardly looking forward to the prospect of returning home to live with mum and dad. “My landlord put the rent up by £300 a month and it just didn’t seem worth staying for a shared house,” she recalls.
So, she packed up and moved to the other side of London; back into the room she grew up in. “I feel pretty trapped,” she says, noting how her parents are constantly around, surveilling her every move like when she was a teenager. “My world just suddenly seems very small. The only other time I felt like that was when I last lived here at 23 and I escaped that by leaving the country. Maybe that’s what I need to do this time.”
The trouble is, Ellie can’t afford to leave the country. She can barely afford to leave her parents’ house or maintain the co-working space she rents out because even that has upped its monthly price by 10 per cent. Essentially, like many other single, city-dwelling millennials, Ellie is slowly being priced out of her life. And it’s not clear when, or if, she’ll be able to buy her way back in.
