Grenfell, Windrush, Horizon - just a few examples in recent history where the warnings were there, but ignored because of who raised the alarm. The housing crisis is no different.
The young people we support at Open Door Scotland are 16 to 25-year-olds leaving care, sofa-surfing between friends' floors, or sleeping in B&Bs. They are often invisible in statistics that politicians cite, and have never had the luxury of calling housing insecurity a recent phenomenon. For them, it was the baseline; a postcode lottery that was never in their favour, built on decades of policy that treated adequate housing as a reward for the right kind of life, rather than a foundation for life itself.
To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1980. Right to Buy was sold as democratising home ownership, and for many individuals, it was. But at a population level, it was the slow demolition of a public asset that was never adequately replaced. Over a million council homes were sold off and the building of new social housing ground to a halt. What had been a floor beneath the poorest became, generation by generation, a distant memory.
Then came Brexit. EU nationals working in UK construction fell by over 40% between 2017 and 2020 - when we were already decades behind on building targets. A quarter of firms reported severe labour shortages and project costs rose. We needed to build our way out of a hole that Thatcher dug, and Brexit meant we couldn't find enough people to hold the shovels.
We shouldn't need a housing crisis to reach the middle classes before we take it seriously - but here we are - and this is only half the story. UK youth unemployment has risen to 16.2% - the highest rate in a decade, and the first time in 25 years that it has overtaken the EU average. Early-career positions are being cut fastest, with employers pulling back most sharply from roles requiring two to five years' experience. With AI absorbing the entry-level work that used to be the first rung on every ladder, the number of young people not in education, employment or training has now surpassed one million.
The optimists will tell you not to worry; that's what they said about the Industrial Revolution too. In the long run, they weren't entirely wrong - new industries did emerge, living standards did rise. But it’s worth remembering what “the long run” actually cost: a century of slums, child labour, and desolation before workers organised. People in the same mill, the same mine, or the same factory, could look each other in the eye and collectively refuse. That mechanism is broken now. There are currently 2.5 jobseekers per vacancy in the toughest hiring stretch in a decade. When a firm automates an entry-level role, there is no picket line. There is no strike. There is simply a vacancy that disappears, a young person who loses hope, and - if a company faces any pressure at all - a cheaper contractor, in another city, or another country, willing to do what remains for less.
The geography of disruption has changed. The Industrial Revolution was brutal, but it was local. Communities could cohere around shared suffering and shared demands. The automation of 2026 is distributed, frictionless, and global. It doesn't displace a town. It dissolves opportunity quietly, across a generation, without anyone having to be visibly responsible for it. This is where housing and employment collapse into the same crisis, with the people we serve at Open Door Scotland sitting at the intersection. Young people leaving care don't have parents to move back in with. They don't have a family safety net to cushion a six-month job search. They can't take an unpaid internship. They can't afford to wait for the market to correct. A hiring subsidy will not help a 19-year-old who is too anxious to leave the house, and the anxiety of precarious, uncertain work radiates outward long before any job is lost. When entry-level work dries up and rents stay unaffordable, homelessness isn't a failure of individual resilience. It's an entirely predictable outcome of structural choices we are making right now, in real time, without adequate urgency. The housing crisis didn't begin when graduates started struggling to rent, and the AI employment crisis won't be solved by telling young people to reskill.These are sticking plasters on a wound we haven't yet agreed to look at directly.
After the war, we decided that "inevitable" wasn't good enough and built a million council homes in a decade. That resolve is still available to us, but it requires people with power; commissioners, employers, policymakers - to stop treating structural failure as a personal responsibility problem. The door is open - someone has to decide to walk through it.
Liss Owen, CEO
