Do second home owners kill villages?
In an article on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) blog, that’s the question asked.
Apparently Great Britain is struggling with changing rural industry, like so many other areas in the United States and around the world. Manufacturing no longer exists, tourism is becoming more important, and young people are moving out of rural areas. The elderly and retired are moving to rural villages in record numbers.
With a proposed bad on the purchase of second homes, the British government has officially responded by saying that banning second home owners from buying in rural areas would not provide more affordable homes to locals, saying it believes “there are more innovative ways” of providing assistance “without interfering with the legitimate right” to own more than one home.
The original report, prepared by Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor, called for a selective “ban” on the purchase of second homes:
“But in some communities, when there are too many second home owners,” Taylor says, “the community itself dies. And while it is not in a huge number of areas, in those places we should say enough is enough.”
So do second home owners add or detract from rural areas? Are the communities and economies in which they choose to invest being destroyed by the very nature of their seasonal visits?
BBC reporter Jon Kay visited the village of Exford on Exmoor to see what the full-time residents thought of second home owners. What struck him was how few of the cottages had lights on or smoke coming out of the chimneys.
Mark, an Exford resident in his 20s, says: “It’s a nightmare. This problem has been growing for the last decade. House prices don’t reflect people’s incomes.”
Another resident is equally critical of the housing market.
She says: “[Second home owners] are taking the housing that we would like to have available for our locals but they just out-price us so our children grow up and can’t stay put.”
A third resident explains the effects. “The newsagents has gone, the garage has gone and if a lot of these properties were filled, perhaps these businesses could have been kept going,” he says.
In one house for sale, 25 prospective buyers looked round the property – not one of them a local resident.”
So what is the role of second home owners in your rural community?
And what effect do second home owners have on your business and the local economy?
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Second homeowners can kill a community. We have a lot of “weekenders” that come from Houston to the lake, but it’s mostly summer traffic. In the winter we don’t see much of them. They really do contribute to our community and it’s commerce, but it’s mostly a weekend thing. Good for some, bad for others.
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