Abstract
Analyses of the impacts of second home ownership in rural areas, around the world, regularly align with a “loss of community” thesis, linking second homes to a range of negative socio-economic consequences. This article looks again at the second home issue, developing a perspective that attributes a particular social value to temporary and seasonal rural residence. It proposes a framework for thinking about this phenomenon that brings together writings on the nature of place dwelling with ideas of social capital accumulation, and the potential interconnectors that temporary residents provide between the otherwise closed (or more limited) social networks of some rural communities and wider socio-economic and professional worlds. It argues that second homes may give communities a potential store of “bridging” social capital. Moreover, it proposes that second homes have a clear social value within rural community structures, and aims to open a research agenda and debate around the measurement and likely extent of this value.
Highlights
Considerations of the impacts of second home, vacation cottage or holiday/ recreational home ownership and use in rural areas, around the world, regularly align with a “loss of community” thesis, with second homes linked to a range of negative socio-economic consequences
Many prior analyses of the socio-economic contribution of second homes to rural communities have focused on the direct and indirect income they generate for local economies, calculating income generated during the buying and selling of properties (Jenkin 1985); quantifying the confidence that second homes bring to housing markets through increase in property values (Hoggart, Buller, and Black 1995); valuing general stock improvement; and measuring tourism expenditure, property tax contributions and increased spending on local services (Gallent, Mace, and Tewdwr-Jones 2005, 51–61)
This paper has developed a perspective on second homes which links this phenomenon to community development
Summary
36–41): broadly, the gentrification of some villages, the knock-on effect for services (especially schools) and a presumed reduction in cohesiveness of communities, as social networks are weakened or lost completely. In some capital or core cities – London, New York, Paris and Rome, for example – this attraction is often expressed as international property investment, given impetus by a broad range of factors It is in rural areas where second homes have sparked significant debate and political reaction. Housing scarcity in the face of adventitious demand, in the most picturesque and accessible areas, combined with a dominant construction of “what the countryside is for” (which prioritizes “nature over worldliness” (Williams 1973, 46)) is found to be at heart of many rural housing tensions and conflicts (Satsangi, Gallent, and Bevan 2010, 238) It is this intellectual and physical space that is occupied by rural second homes and in which their particular development path and assumed social impacts are rooted
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