WREXHAM, WALES — During a bustling lunch hour in this Welsh commuter town, 25-year-old Richard Williams is one of the few who pause to look at properties for sale in a real estate agent's window -- and he isn't buying.
"I'd love to, but I'm single and I can't afford to buy anything on my own; nobody would give me a mortgage," explained Williams, a delivery driver who recently moved back home with his parents after his rent went up.
The plight of Williams -- and hundreds more like him -- has made Wrexham, situated on the doorstep of the mountain peaks of the stunning Snowdonia National Park, one of the towns hardest hit by the global credit squeeze.
Those troubles are increasingly seen as a microcosm of the situation around Britain. With falling house prices, rising rents and more expensive mortgages coming on top of soaring fuel and food costs, there is a feeling that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labor government moved too slowly to ease the fallout from the U.S. subprime market collapse.
At the start of the decade, Wrexham -- the largest town in north Wales, with a population of about 43,000 -- boasted some of the steepest house price increases in Britain. The long boom fueled a regeneration of the town, which is just a short ride from the cities of Chester and Manchester in England.
Hundreds of new homes went up on the outskirts of Wrexham, adding contemporary buildings to the mix of modern shopping streets, Tudor-style buildings and the medieval church in the center of town, which has a long history of mining, brewing and leather tanning.
Now, many of those completed apartments and houses still await sale, developers have scaled back housing projects, repossessions are up, and the half a dozen or so real estate offices are empty of prospective customers.
House prices in Wrexham fell 5.4% in the year to May after recording the steepest drop anywhere in the country in April, according to the Land Registry, with an average price of 143,460 pounds (about $268,000).
That compares with a 1.8% decline across Britain over the same period to an average 183,266 pounds. Mortgage approvals are down 64% nationally from last year.
Britain's housing downturn is still less severe than the slump in the United States, where home prices nationwide have fallen 18% as of May from the peak of the market in July 2006, according to the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller 20-city index.
