Second home owning
Pick of the week’s correspondence
Are second homes ruining rural life?
George Monbiot’s article is typical of the fashionable rants against second-home owners. In the community in which I have my second home (yes, I am biased) there were traditionally five working farms and three cottages. There are still eight permanent residents, but no working farms. There are, however, now 17 dwellings. The rest of us live in the converted barns and cow-sheds that used to be part of the working farms: we have not taken houses away from the local population, but made use of the redundant farm buildings.
In adding to the housing stock we, as part of the tourist industry, have helped create local employment that drives the local demand for housing. Punitive taxation on second homes will not eliminate the demand, but simply drive it elsewhere – to France and Spain, for example. Those economies will then benefit from the leisure industries that affluence creates, while in rural Britain it may be a race for which falls the faster: the price of houses or the number of jobs.
There is a problem of affordability of housing in the UK. But it is not confined to those areas where second homes are common, nor is it a problem amenable to a simple, knee-jerk solution.
Tony Parsons, 3rd June 2006
Check the reading archive for further items
Second home owning
Second home owning – exercise
Are second homes ruining rural life?
This letter was written in response to an article published in The Guardian. The statements below summarise 15 points made in this letter. Can you put them in order, and say which 5 statements are not in the letter?
- House-prices are also often high in places where people do not holiday.
- If we remove the financial incentive for second-home buyers this will create unemployment.
- People like Georges Monbiot are just envious of people like me.
- Consequently, people who might otherwise have moved away from the area have stayed there.
- Holiday homes attract other industries around them, and this again creates more jobs.
- People are often priced out of the housing market in Great Britain.
- People who own second homes are criticised a lot at the moment.
- Second-home owners are being scapegoated for a problem they have not created.
- If we remove the financial incentive for second-home buyers this will create unemployment.
- House conversions are essential to support local building-firms in the local economy.
- A number of people have abandoned farming life.
- It is foolish to imply that solving the housing availability problem is obvious and straightforward.
- Buying properties to let to tourists creates jobs for local people.
- House-buyers have spent money on doing up non-residential buildings.
- I would rather put my money into the domestic property market than invest abroad.
- People who own second homes are criticised a lot at the moment.
- If we make people pay taxes on their holiday homes here, people will just go and buy properties abroad.
- I am certain that purchasing a second home has actually been a positive rather than a negative contribution to the local economy.
- Out-buildings often fall into disuse in such circumstances.
- I am a second-home owner.