What do you do about a problem like the housing market? Well, if you’re me, you sail off into the sunset.
Readers of this column might remember that a few months ago I was poring over "for sale" property listings with as much optimism and superstition as if I were reading my daily horoscope. When my family decided to return from living overseas, Glasgow was our first choice for a number of reasons. For me it was sort of "home" having grown up in Airdrie and Coatbridge and, having previously lived in London for 14 years where £1,000 a month rented you a shoebox where a microwave inside a wardrobe (with utensils nailed on the inside of the doors) was regarded as a kitchen, we naively assumed finding a place to live and Glasgow would be easier.
However, we hadn't reckoned on the Scottish housing market. Initially, we found a tenement sublet through friends of friends. So it was only when I started my role as a lecturer at Glasgow University that I learned about the issues facing many students in finding anywhere to live, let alone somewhere safe, fun and conducive to the developing and learning experience that university should be.
Perhaps I’m more sensitive to this than most, having grown up in a collection of homeless shelters, caravans and the worst flats, on the worst blocks in the worst council estates. Certainly, I knew I wanted my son to have a secure place to live and so, despite everyone’s protestations that the housing market was "mental", my husband and I made our focus trying to buy our first home.
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We actually got extremely close, as close as days away from signing the missives on a little two-bedroom flat in Southside’s Mansewood. But then my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly and with that came unexpected costs and financial complexities that meant we weren’t in a position to offer what we had expected as an "offer over" - in the competitive Southside market anywhere between 10-20% of the valuation. We withdrew from the sale and by the time we'd been able to figure out a solution, a week later, the property had already gone to another buyer.
Now we are embarking on a truly alternative way of living. My family and I are in the process of trying to secure a canal mooring in Glasgow so that we can live on a boat. Ten years ago in London, just as the housing crisis was starting to bite, when it was clear that only bankers and those with generational wealth could afford to live in the city, there was a huge surge in popularity for living on the waterways.
Indeed, for a while I lived on a boat myself. When I say boat I mean it was a flimsy static porta-cabin floating on the Thames. I grew up in Scottish council houses in the 1980s and readers will know how unbearably cold they often were, but I can tell you that nothing was as cold as that boat. Damp permeated every single surface. At the time I was writing my first book and when I got home from my day job at an NGO I had to type with a hot water bottle under my hands so my fingers would move, while the oil heater was warmed up to a balmy 5C. One day I had to break out of my own home because a sheet of ice covered the whole exterior.
And yet, I loved it. The beauty of waking every morning on the water, the gaggle of swans who came and pecked at my window at breakfast time for scraps, the kind and tight-knit community of other people who had chosen an alternative way of living. There’s a reason why it’s so many people’s dream.
If it's a dream that appeals to you too, I should warn you that we’re discovering that it is not easy. As it stands, we are on a waiting list for a residential mooring, they’re first come first served, and we're able to select up to three marinas at a time.
Boatlife is not necessarily a cheap option either. Currently, because of a surge in demand, you pay around £1,000 pounds per foot of a second-hand canal boat. Though there are specialist marine mortgages they're not always the most favourable terms. Besides this, there are mooring fees of around £2,500 all the way up to £6,500 annually. Add to this maintenance costs - many boat owners refer to their homes as large, money-guzzling pets - and you might find it cheaper renting a two-bed in the suburbs.
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Still for us, it feels like the right move. The perfect balance of being settled and having a home we can’t be turfed out of. Indeed, the optimistic headlines in the last few weeks about house prices plummeting by 8% only made me more certain that it was not a good time to invest in our first home. When I wrote my initial column on house buying, I asked our excellent mortgage broker for a quote and she said, I’m paraphrasing, by the time it was published it’s possible the market might have changed all over again. That is not a rollercoaster I want to ride with every penny we have.
I'd rather sail the slow calm waters at the canal, the Falkirk Wheel, the locks and lochs across Scotland, with my little boy at the tiller. I don't know how long we'll have to wait, either for a mooring or to find the right boat. But, if further housing precarity is what we're faced with, just as I was faced with it 10 years ago in London, then we choose adventure.
What I do know is that living on Scotland's waterways feels about as secure right now as buying a bricks and mortar home in the housing market. No horoscopes or crystal balls required.
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