In postwar Britain the happy-ever-after of all love affairs has involved housing. Youngsters fall in love, buy a flat, have babies, buy a house with a garden and a fence and a herbaceous border. But no longer. Choose love, or choose the house - only a lucky few will manage both. The changing face of the property market, and the lingering allure of ownership, will make mercenaries out of a disenfranchised generation of renters.

We are hurtling back towards an era of inherited wealth, of familial obligations and marriages made with an eye on incomes and equity stakes. The literary role models of younger generations will no longer be Jane Austen's genteel misses, embarrassed by maternal grasping. Trampling on the Bennet girls will be Trollope's Arabella Trefoil, with her relentless stalking of the titled and propertied Lord Rufford. Felix Carbury's ruthless, if useless, pursuit of the heiress Marie Melmotte will set the standard for the boys. Otherwise today's youth must kiss farewell to dreams of home ownership, and limply surrender their monthly wages to their landlords.

The baby boomers bought all the houses, then bought a few more to fund their pensions, and pulled up the ladder behind them. Only the exclusive Bank of Mum and Dad is willing to fund the gap between the property owners and renters. The nation is polarising into those with housing equity in their families, and those without.

The current mini-revival in the property market lays bare this divide. It is clear that the market is moving again. But cash is king. Between January and April this year the number of cash buyers rose 92 per cent. Mortgages deals are being struck, but only to those with a deposit of 25 per cent or more. Despite the price falls, only the already-propertied are buying in this market, out bargain hunting with bulging wallets.

First-time buyers are rare. Home ownership remains a universal aspiration but an exclusive club; membership decided by age and income.

This is a process that started before the credit crunch, but has been exacerbated by it. The past century has experienced an explosion in owner-occupation of property. After the First World War, just under 80 per cent of homes were rented. Private renting started its decline, accelerating after the Second World War. As the first of the baby boomers hit the jobs market in the early 1960s, 40 per cent of homes were rented and 40 per cent owner-occupied, with the remainder of people living in social housing.

Since that moment of parity, owner-occupation has risen to domination, driven by changes to regulation and the disinvestment of the old, large-scale institutional landlords. By the early 1990s the level of owner occupiers had reached a fairly consistent rate of 70 per cent of housing stock. The baby boomers bought all the houses. Then they paid off their mortgages - 45 per cent of British housing stock is owned outright. In 1946 the average house price in the UK was £1,459. That's £43,303 in today's money. The average price of a property today is £152,898.

Pause to consider this. If you just take houses (as opposed to flats), the average price is £224,024, so any lender would demand a cash down-payment of £56,006. The average wage is £24,908. Even if, ignoring all the other demands on his cash, the average earner puts aside 5 per cent of take-home pay, it would take 35 years to save the deposit on an average home, assuming an interest rate of 3 per cent and an absurd stagnation of house price inflation.

After the last housing market crisis in the early 1990s and the return to boomtime in prices, demand for rented homes began a slow rise as the young began to be priced out. Official statistics show that 48 per cent of heads of household in the private rental sector are now under the age of 35, compared to 20 per cent in social renting and 13 per cent in owner occupation.

Then came the banks' folly, the doling out of cash to anyone who asked. But while lending was cheap, housing was expensive. Credit was crunched, house prices sank. But there was a cruel twist for the young renters hoping to plant a desperate foot on the bottom rung. While housing may have become marginally more affordable - falling by one fifth since 2007, according to the Bank of England - mortgages have become less so.

Just as the ladder is unfurled from the treehouse where the baby boomers sit, smugly surveying their stranglehold on the market, they yank it away again, laughing.

In the depths of the credit crunch, when the banks were mired in the fear of each other and the loathing of the public, it was impossible to get a home loan without a 40 per cent deposit. Now that the fear has subsided to a faint suspicion, and the loathing has mutated to contempt, there is a little more flexibility. It is possible to get a mortgage with a smaller deposit, but at the price of a good rate. A home buyer taking out a £150,000 mortgage from NatWest will pay £398.75 a month interest, but only if they have a deposit of 25 per cent. Britannia Building Society will lend on only a 10 per cent deposit - but the same value mortgage will cost £686.25. Home ownership is becoming the worst type of club - cheap for those who can afford it, ruinously expensive for those that can not.

The baby boomers did work hard for their bounty. Grammar schools were great engines of social mobility, and the baby boomer land-grab was part of a glorious levelling of society, a fabulous explosion of middle-class membership and prosperity. They passed Britain's assets around in a quiet social revolution, with chilled chardonnays in hand and the Rolling Stones playing on the hi-fi.

But then the music stopped, and the baby boomers were occupying all the chairs. They got the affordable houses, free higher education, final salary pensions, the NHS and the opportunity to move seamlessly between social and financial tribes. Today's teens will get crippling student debt, an inescapable tango with a succession of landlords, a crumbling health service, a rising tax burden and a paltry pension. Unless Bank of Mum and Dad, whether it is managed by parents or judiciously chosen parents-in-law, is open, and generous in its rates. The problem with a generation that relies on Bank of Mum and Dad is that its operations can only calcify the social divides which the baby-boomers taught us to believe were fluid.

The baby boomers re-invented Britain, but their legacy may be a return to more Victorian attitudes to wealth and inheritance. And, regrettably for any romantics among you, to marrying for money.

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