Hermione Eyre: Can't buy, must rent - how the young survive

We remain behaviourally adolescent, rooming like college brats, sharing CDs and toothpaste

The first rung of the property ladder is now so high and distant that most young people can not even see it. Last week, figures were released that indicated another house price hike of almost 20 per cent, but these figures were not much remarked on by my peers. It was of abstract interest, but came no closer to affecting us than the reports from the Mars Express spacecraft. For most of my generation of young graduates, buying a house has been put off, perhaps until we are 30, perhaps indefinitely. In the meantime, we rent.

In London, I live in temporary digs, with borrowed furniture and three girlfriends. We rent together, because it is more affordable. In fact, it is the only way to make a metropolitan address possible. We share food, friends and sometimes clothes. We have all contributed to our stock of china, which comes in an assortment of sizes and colours, and has a low life expectancy.

We display, as a renting generation, a slightly arrested development. Our temporary accommodation is picked up easily (some friends of mine chose their neighbourhood simply because it was the beat of a renting agency with an attractive website) and is easily left behind. It doesn't entail any responsibilities to the neighbourhood - there is no point tending to a garden, for example. The tenant, permanently shifting around town, doesn't have mature concerns such as choosing a district, committing to it, and putting roots down there.

"We pay £17 a night," said one friend of her flatshare. "It's like we're living in a hotel. Especially if you think of takeaways as room service." She illustrates how little commitment young tenants have to the homes in which they live: the upkeep is managed by the landlord, who steps in every time the lights fuse or the pipes jam. Some landlords have even been known to help with the changing of a light bulb. Although these tenants live demanding adult work lives, their home life is juvenile. Renting culture teeters too easily into infantilism.

It goes hand in hand with a desire to keep a toehold on the parental home. I recently heard a 27-year-old friend fervently advising someone not to let his parents encroach on what used to be his childhood bedroom. "If you let them keep their things in there then you'll lose it. You'll come home and find it's been turned into a darkroom or something."

Socially, there is a tendency for renting twentysomethings to behave like swanky teenagers. Living in shared accommodation lowers the likelihood of sleep before midnight to approximately nil, despite individual rooms and the judicious use of earplugs. It also encourages a flow of chatter, visiting friends, arguments about noise and strangers found sleeping in the bath. Privacy is at a minimum, the chances of sustaining an uninterrupted conversation in the living room slim.

This kind of living has advantages, too: it sparks debate and the exchange of ideas. And it is certainly less stifling than the 80s alternative - when first homes were still affordable - which saw people at my age sitting separately in their own terraced houses thinking about their mortgages.

Nonetheless, my generation remains behaviourally adolescent, rooming like superannuated college brats, sharing everything from CD collections to toothpaste. Until we are forced from this comforting shell, we won't develop our own self-confident identities.

Communal living makes it harder to foster long-term romantic partnerships - it's an arena where friends, not boyfriends or girlfriends, remain paramount. Ties of loyalty tend to be between flatmates. Postponing buying a house and postponing getting married are mutually reinforcing.

But stalling on both these life events has its positive aspects. Choosing a home and choosing a spouse are important decisions to be made, no one should be rushed. My generation is taking its journey to maturity slowly, and this is ultimately, a privilege.

My mother, at 24, had her own flat and was soon to be engaged. Yet I at the same age am a long way off those rites of passage. My generation leaves education much later; "deferring" for a year before or after secondary education (and in many cases, both) is increasingly popular. Combined with travel, part-time work and non-committal jobs, it is no wonder my generation grows up less quickly.

We may operate with economic infantilism, borrowing blithely, ignoring pension schemes and blowing half our annual earnings on rent. Yet when we do finally assume the adult responsibilities of house, mortgage and family, we will do so with our eyes open and the benefit of a few extra years of experience.

Surely, given the rise in life expectancy, a long, drawn-out youth is now imperative for a balanced life. If you were likely to live as people did 30 years ago, until only 68, you would indeed be keen to have the key to your own door at 21. But if you're going to live till 90, it makes more sense to rent the key to someone else's.

h.eyre@independent.co.uk