Is having a second home in this country ever justifiable?

[Zog]

Given the amount of houses that we are told needs to be built to keep up with demand? Are they a luxury that is becoming unsustainable, like cheap air travel?

I don't take holidays in s/c cottages.
Trouble is those peopel contribute very little.
For a start they tend to arrive with a truckload of groceries from home.
In a place where a language is vulnerable it is plain wrong,as it is in a place where locals are priced out.

I have never been able to afford any other sort of holiday moondog, not with children anyway.

Hello ggg my love.
I have a lot of Breton friends and connections who are similarly pissed off.

dumbledores girl - if owner lived in their cottage ALL WINTER then vacated for the summer season, i guess that would be OK!!

But can I reassure you, I have never taken my own groceries with me - never that organised!

Are the sons of Owain Glyndwr still around Moondog, or have they dropped out? My 'uncle' Evan once disposed of a bomb they'd left by the Ffestiniog railway. Appreciated their POV but not the tactics. Used to be a joke about 'Come home to a real fire. Buy a cottage in Wales'.

Come by all means.Buy a house by all means.
Just learn the language and bloody join in!!!!

I have lots of foreign and English friends who have integrated very happily.The chief exec of Cymuned,my friend Aran,grew up in Sri Lanka and learnt Welshin his late 20s.

lol at DG.
There may be one or two sleeper cells.

I would guess the reason why 4x4s attract more condemnation is because they are a damn sight more common than second homes!

I think I do kind of agree with you moondog about integrating yourself and learning the language. That is exactly why we live just over the border in England even though dh works in Wales: because I didn't want my children learning Welsh as they are not strong linguistically and I imagine it is unlikely they will stay in Wales as adults. It never occurred to me that we might live in Wales and not have to learn the language.

BTW, will I now get attacked for allowing my dh to take Welsh jobs?

Ah, the lovely traditional Welsh welcome in the hillsides, I see.

As an aside,my kid's school was closed last week because apparently the snow up the road (all 10 cm of it) meant that the cook (who works about 3 hours a day cooking lunch for 50 kids)couldn't get down.

You mean to tell me that noone with a 4WD couldn't go and get her????

Result was that about 60 working people had to take a whole bloody day off work.

I think the British have an unusual way of owning second homes, in that they seem to want to buy them in quite populated areas where they are pricing the locals out. In other countries (admittedly less populated ones) holiday homes are generally in the back of beyond, the kind of remote places where, if there weren't a holiday home there, there probably wouldn't be any home there at all. In some countries it's the environmentally friendly thing to do as it avoids flying, eg New Zealand where there is plenty of land and coastline but there is a high environmental and economic cost to foreign holidays.

Most second home owners aren't welcome anyway.
That is what I can't get my head around,the crassness of these people..
I really couldn't enjoy myself in a place where I knew people felt (at best) hostile towards me.

Noone in my village gives two hoots about the strange London couple who appear periodically at their house in the village.

Yay at last someone mentioned the LAke district, which now seems to be mainly holiday homes and second homes and its oonly recently that the owners have had to pay full council tax.Majority of locals can't afford to buy or even rent here as the work is nearly all seasonal and low paid .

'the work is nearly all seasonal and low paid . '

yep. i pointed this out on another thread.

what ends up happening here in scotland is that these seasonal low paid jobs are taken up by Eastern European migrants, who live incredibly cheaply whilst here, then take the bulk of the money back w/them to their home country when the season ends.

so the village is even poorer for it all.

VERY common phenomenon here.

and the reason the Eastern Euopean migrants do the work is because no one is prepared to!

Yeah loads of Polish people in Ambleside when we went a couple of weeks ago.

Not at all, Coolmama, but b/c they (locals/natives, whatever you want to call it) cannot afford to live in the area permanently if the only work that's going is low-paid and seasonal - they cannot afford the rents - the Eastern Euros who work around these places more often than not come with no dependents in tow, rent a caravan or two, and 10 or 12 of them live in it during the tourist season).

It's not feasible for a family to live in one of these areas if they cannot get year-round work.

Much less a living wage.

I would say that at some point, this trend has to be arrested. At what stage do we question what is going on? When there are whole regions where no-one actually lives there permanently?

There are certainly villages that are almost there.

Where I live there are a lot of second homes of the city crash-pad variety. It makes it very strange at weekends and in holidays, because all the jaguar cars disappear from zooming our road.

I think if second homes must be bought up by wealthier people, then locals must be built rented accomodation to replace it. That cannot be sold.