Skye's housing crisis taps a generational issue

In the pub in Glasgow last week I ran into a couple of boys from Skye. I say boys, we’re grown men now comparing how our bodies are falling apart, but 25-odd years ago we could drink, smoke and dance through an island night and think nothing of climbing a hill like Glamaig the next morning.

For me living on Skye in my twenties was a golden time and these boys, members of Skye’s Camanachd Cup winning team, were a golden generation.

On the island people took me in as one of their own (even though I was from Lewis) and were incredibly generous. But my life and career took a lovely turn and I left.  

Yet, for anyone who has lived on Skye, the second most visited tourist destination in Scotland after Edinburgh, having the island voted the most beautiful place to live in the UK will come as no surprise.

The island has that perfect visual combination of water, woods and mountains - a scenic magic you might find echoed on the island of Corsica or the Norwegian coast, but truly nowhere else in the United Kingdom.

All this beauty comes at a cost. 

In a striking Facebook post this weekend another Skye friend, architect Alasdair Stephen, laid out in stark detail how the dream of the island living is beyond the generation growing up there.

It is worth reading Alasdair’s post, and the responses it has generated from a real “left behind” generation all over Scotland, but I’ll reproduce most of it here, it speaks for itself.

Alasdair said: “If you want to understand the disaster of the housing crisis in rural Scotland then look at these figures.

Twenty years ago I built my house on Skye.

In 1996 my plot was valued at £9,000. The same plot would cost £80,000 in Sleat today.

The construction cost of my house in 1996 was £35,000.

Building the same house today would cost £150,000 using a main contractor.

However changes in building regulations means that I could not build that house today. The house could easily cost £220,000 (new building regs and devalued pound will see this rise rapidly in future).

In 1996 I qualified for a Rural Home Ownership Grant. That covered 1/3 of my costs. It meant my mortgage was £22,000 (which was 2 1/2 times my income at the time).

There are no similar grants available any more for young people in rural Scotland.

Two and a half times a typical Highland salary for a young person would probably get you a £50,000 mortgage.

But a 26 yr old would need to access around £300,000 today to do what I did with £22,000 20 years ago.

The consequences of this is that the young cannot live in their own communities. Businesses cannot expand or are never realised. In Lewis the rural villages are dying (along with schools and Gaelic) as the young move to Stornoway for accommodation.

And don’t expect the young to be able to compete on the existing housing market.

I would really like to know what the Scottish Government is going to do about this. It requires some big thinking.”

Alasdair followed up his post with an interview on Radio nan Gaidheal appealing for Nicola Sturgeon to make rural housing an agenda priority.

If there was anyone I’d turn to for advice on the housing crisis it would be Alasdair and his brother Neil. As architects living on Skye they walked the walk and they’ve seen close-up land and housing prices spiral beyond the reach of anyone with an average income.

There are two points here, though one of them almost incidental.

The first is that although housing crisis in Skye is a long-standing problem, Alasdair has tapped into the frustration and disappointment of hundreds of young people at the rag-end of this awful year and and channelled that into something that could be quite positive.

You can see from the responses to his post that he has connected people to a massive issue that plays not just into housing but the entire economic future and make-up of rural Scotland.

If what propelled Trump and Brexit revolutions are the “left-behind” voters, then Scotland is creating its own “get out” generation of people who can’t afford to live where they were brought up.

Their voices deserve an answer and a political solution.

The problem, as Alasdair states, is bigger than housing and demands a response to match.

In the 1920s the solution to Highland over-population and economic decline was assisted emigration to Canada, the USA and elsewhere. Scotland needs to think seriously about a new Highland project to keep young people at home.  

The second point is a kind of tragedy. I couldn’t afford a house on Skye at the time, couldn’t afford one now. Fortunately I made a home elsewhere.

Alasdair did manage to build his by dint of his professional knowledge, his commitment to living on Skye and a self-confidence which has now built a business that employs 20 people.

But hundreds of other people now my age, who might otherwise be on the housing, family and the school run on Skye or Lewis or elsewhere, simply aren’t there.

That loss is being repeated year after year until the real beauty is emptied out of these island communities.

There is a coda to this, which I find a bit tragic too.

Alasdair and I are friends on either side of the independence debate and we agree this issue has nothing to do with the constitution.

But I regret we’ve both spent so much time pursuing a zero sum game, though I appreciate he won’t see it as that.

It doesn’t take constitutional change to build homes and if a tenth of our collective energy was put towards making a change in housing for young people then we would be on the way to building, literally building, a better nation.

Depressingly, I feel as if we’ve gone from being a golden generation to a wasted one, ill-serving the people coming behind us.