“I feel like I’ve done everything right,” Ms. Young said. “I’ve played by the rules,” she said, adding that she felt she had no control over what had been a compounding series of stresses. “It’s just one thing on top of another — on top of another.”
The times feel “Dickensian,” said Rob Cowlin, 35, who will need to renegotiate his mortgage in the next two weeks and calculated that his monthly mortgage for a home in Essex, in southeastern England, could go to over £2,000 a month, from £1,300. Even with a job in I.T., Mr. Cowlin said he was lighting candles and wearing coats instead of using the radiator to cut costs. “You’re paying to stay alive — food, energy, house,” he said.
“If that’s happening to me, it’s going to be way worse on people who earn less,” he added.
With a supply of homes far lower than demand, house prices in Britain in recent decades have surged to become among the most expensive in the world, while interest rates have remained relatively low.
“It’s like the Bay Area on steroids in that we have an incredibly inelastic supply,” said Paul Cheshire, an emeritus professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics. Institutions in recent times, he said, had also created financial regulations to prevent people from borrowing too much.
Still, economists said the decisions of lenders to withdraw products suddenly this week was an expression of the extraordinary uncertainty in the financial markets as banks and other lenders tried to assess the path of interest rates amid wrenching volatility.
“It’s changing in front of their eyes,” Mr. Cheshire said, calling it “almost unprecedented.”
