Aldermere never collapsed. It became richer, cleaner, safer and more desirable. Its universities expanded, its industries prospered, its transport improved and thousands of new homes were built. Yet, generation by generation, something extraordinary happened: the people raised there could no longer afford to raise their own children there.

What began as an ordinary housing shortage produced reasonable solutions. Governments helped first-time buyers. Parents used the value of their homes to support their children. Banks made family-backed mortgages easier. Developers responded to what buyers could afford. Inheritance arrived earlier, property became family infrastructure, and owning a home increasingly determined whether the next generation could own one too.

Looking back across decades of change, The City That Priced Out Its Children traces the future history of a prosperous city in which the divide between owner and renter gradually became something deeper: the divide between heir and non-heir. Schools close while commuter towns fill with families, essential workers travel farther to serve the city they once called home, and governments discover how difficult it is to reverse a housing system that millions of individually reasonable decisions helped to create.

A speculative future history about housing, inheritance, family and the price of belonging.