Villagers swamped by second homes cheer vandalsLocals feeling isolated by well-heeled influx applaud outbreak of hostile graffiti
Peter Walker The Guardian, Saturday 21 March 2009 Article historyJill Thompson is 71, a churchgoing pillar of her community and not the sort to condone vandalism. But she makes an exception for the still unidentified locals who daubed graffiti condemning second home owners and other incomers on a nearby estate of expensive new houses.
"I don't really make a habit of encouraging criminality," she said on the doorstep of her terrace house in Worth Matravers, one of perhaps 40% of properties in the pretty Dorset village to be occupied all year round. "But if I'd known it was happening I'd have given them the paint."
"And made a cup of tea for them afterwards," added her next-door neighbour, Jan Dart, 55.
This uncommon sympathy for lawbreaking is a symptom of what remains a pressing problem in many rural areas, and one not alleviated by the economic downturn: the crushing lack of affordable housing for local people. A combination of London-style prices in areas with very un-London incomes is slowly killing hundreds of villages, rural campaigners warn.
In the next few weeks, ministers will respond to a report by Matthew Taylor, the MP for Truro and St Austell in Cornwall, who has recommended measures including local trials in which planning permission would be needed to turn residences into holiday homes.
A week ago slogans including "No More 2nd Homes" and "Go Away" appeared overnight on the walls and driveways of the development of four new houses near the centre of Worth Matravers, a village of about 170 properties occupying a glorious spot on hills overlooking the extended inlet that forms Poole harbour. At around £450,000 each, the smart new homes, built from grey-brown Purbeck stone, are aimed at second home purchasers or comfortable retirees from elsewhere, rather than locals in an area where most jobs come from farming, quarrying or tourism. This development attracted extra local ire as it occupies the site of a former craft centre and cafe.
Thomson remembers when the village also had two shops and a post office. These closed, leaving just a pub. "When I walk to the church at 6pm on a winter evening there's hardly a light on in any house. It feels very lonely and not very safe at all," she said. In her experience, few second home owners integrate into local life. "They come down from London, spend two weeks telling us what to do and complaining about the mobile phone signal and then they go home again."
A few minutes away is the duck pond and well-tended green. A 20-year-old local woman, who asked not to be named, was cutting the grass for a local gardening firm. At the end of the day she would return to a caravan, her home for the past three years. "Doing a job like this, it's all I can afford. I couldn't pay the rent on a flat," she said.
According to data collected by the Commissioner for Rural Communities, just over 7% of housing in Purbeck is made up of second homes, among the highest proportions in the country. Mark Sturgess, head of planning for Purbeck council, believes that the real figure is closer to 10%, while in places such as Worth Matravers it could be six times that.
"A lot of places have reached a sort of critical mass, after which local businesses like pubs, post offices and shops can't survive," he said.
Taylor, who delivered his report last July, said affordable housing was "a big issue in the postbag" for MPs in constituencies like his. "There is a general issue about the viability of small communities. With the numbers left living permanently you can't support schools, shops, year-round transport or even year-round pubs."
While Taylor expects the government to back "a great deal" of his report, it has already warned it will not support new planning laws for second homes.
Back in Worth Matravers there is a picturesque terrace cul-de-sac of former workers' cottages, almost all bought and tastefully renovated by holiday owners. To the amusement of some locals the street's name is London Row. One part-time occupier, Roger - whose main home is Sussex - said his ilk got "a pretty bad press at times".
He added: "It's not as if these places were thriving before we arrived. Some of the villages used to be pretty run down, and they've done well from second home owners and holiday rentals."
Roger insists he does take a full part in local life: "I've just got back from being in the pub with my neighbours. I think the people are friendly enough. But then I'm a good mixer in general."
Posted by Anonymous to swanageview at 8:08 PM
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Was there once a golden age when people who did badly paid jobs could afford to buy houses in Worth? Nope, they rented. What has changed is the availability of good quality rented housing. How many houses did the former rural district council build in Worth? One little row. How many did PDC build when it was able to? This stuff about second homes is a smokescreen for the failure to provide adequate social housing.
Is there a local councillor/MP in Purbeck, who is trying to solve the second home/affordable housing situation.
If so what is being done to improve this situation. The cost of houses in Purbeck should reflect the average income of those that live and work locally. Not that of city incomes. Ordinary people used to be able to rent or buy housing locally, but now neither is possible. Local residents are needed to maintain this area, farming, businesses,to create thriving communities, if something is not done soon,our children will all be living in sheds, caravans and barns. Why should more new housing be built on 'green areas' when many properties eg. those in Worth are sitting empty, perhaps the owners of these houses could be encouraged to sell their properties to local housing trusts and then they could be rented out to local people or those that would like to live and work here. That is not to say that the second home owners/visitors are not welcome,because they obviously do contribute to our local econmomy, but if they could instead, support the holdiday trade eg B&B, hotels,campsites.
It's a tricky time for anyone wanting to buy their first home, especially those on low incomes in areas where property prices have been pushed up.
However that isn't to say there aren't still opportunities.
There are various government schemes aimed at first time buyers that will enable those on lower incomes to get onto the property ladder. These include schemes whereby the government will provide an equit loan at a very low rate which can be used as a deposit and then the rest of the funds for the property can be obtained from a mortgage lender in the traditional manner.
This can allow someone who is struggling to raise the required deposit to purchsae their first home and will also ensure that it is affordable for the buyer.
If you are interested in finding out more about these schemes a good independent Mortgage broker should be able to advise you on whether or not you are likely to be eligible for the schemes and an idea on how much it would likely cost you each month.
So, we are a young (ish)local couple working full time, we would ideally like to live in Worth Matravers. This as we see it would be an ideal village to bring up our planned family. Our grandparents come from Worth. There is a School just down the road. The Worth Local Plan says that it would support a local village shop, perhaps this is something that may happen in the near future. There is a fantastic pub offering great entertainment, a church and a village hall. A lovely place to swim and some fantastic walks.(Between us we have an annual income of £35,000). Do you know of any affordable housing available for local families in this village, as we understand,that there is a problem with lack of young people being able to afford to live there.
Whilst it is true that we do not have the city salaries the housing situation of those who do badly paid jobs in London and elsewhere is as bad as here. People there are paying £150 a week for a room and up. That can get you a decent two bedroom flat in Swanage. Housing is a national problem calling for national solutions, i.e. the spending of a lot of money.
Reply to 11.59pm
Yes..there was a golden age, about 23 years ago, we bought our house for £48,000, our incomes have hardly increased, this same house (we choose to live in) has now been valued at £400,000. As a local young person renting in the 70's we were easily all able to leave home at 17 with a (lowly) locally paid job and afford to also have a good social life. Now the rent would be between £600-£700a month, now local youngsters live in barns, garages and caravans!!
There is a lot of truth in that. The distribution of income was at its most fair at that time but shortly after it all went into reverse, unemployment was pushed up to several million to "restrain wage demand" and it has been downhill ever since. We are now backto where we were in the 1920s or earlier and having a 1929 style collapse is no coincidence.
By Rosa Prince, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 8:16PM GMT 24 Mar 2009 Telegraph
Hope that this adds to this discussion:
Villages will die unless wealthy stop buying holiday homes
Dozens of the country's most picturesque villages will "die" unless the wealthy are banned from buying holiday homes, according to the author of a Government report on the countryside.
Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor said local people in some of the most desirable parts of the country - including the Lake District and small south coast resorts - risked being priced out of the villages they had grown up in, leaving behind "Disney-esq" dead zones.
Hundreds of beauty spots, such the Norfolk Broads, parts of the Suffolk coast, the New Forest and Peak District, could also be affected.
Wealthy second-home owners who spend much of the year away from their country cottages or rent them out as holiday lets would be responsible for the closure of rural schools, shops and pubs, and ultimately the death of villages.
Ministers will today unveil their response to Mr Taylor's review of the problems facing rural communities. However, they are understood to have rejected his call for restrictions on second homes.
As a result, Mr Taylor warned of growing anger in rural communities over second home ownership - and even raised the prospect of a repeat of the cottage burnings by Welsh extremists in the 1980s and 1990s, which saw the destruction of more than 200 properties used by the English as weekend get-aways.
He said: "If people are not there year-round, then there are no children in the schools or people spending money in the shops and pubs and so they close down and the village dies.
"Weekenders can't keep the shop going, whatever their best intentions. The irony is that the community aspect of the village is a large part of the reason they bought there in the first place."
In his report, Mr Taylor suggested that second-home buyers could be forced to apply to the local council for planning permission before being allowed to use a rural property as a holiday home.
Communities would then monitor levels of second-homes in popular beauty spots, and reject the planning permission request if they thought it would be detrimental to the village.
Margaret Beckett, the Housing Minister, who publishes the Government's response to the Taylor report, is expected to say however that ministers fear that a clampdown on second homes would be too difficult to enforce.
Instead, ministers have decided to focus on Mr Taylor's other recommendations, including a boost in the number of affordable homes available for low-earners in rural areas.
But the Liberal Democrat MP warned: "I sympathise with the Government's concerns about my recommendation on holiday homes, but this is not about stopping second homes, it's about letting a community say: 'enough is enough' in a small number of areas.
"Inaction is not an option - if we don't do something then our most beautiful villages are going to become Disney-esq dead towns.
"These are communities where local people can no longer afford to live, and there is anger about that.
"If you can't afford a home, seeing properties lying empty in your village most of the year is going to make people very upset. Most people would not do anything stupid, but there is a really strong feeling in the countryside that a lot of people are being priced out.
"These are people who have lived in the village all their lives and raised a family there, but their children can't afford to buy.
"A young person who works in the village shop is not going to be able to find the deposit for a £300,000 house. As a result, they end up staying with their parents, or living in a caravan outside the shop - or they move away to the town."
Last week, a luxury housing development in the picture-postcard seaside village of Worth Matravers in Dorset was daubed with graffiti reading "No More 2nd Homes" and "Go Away".
The area is known locally as "Ghost Town," because nearly 60 per cent of its properties are holiday homes, and locals complained that they could not afford the £465,000 price tag of the new development.
Fishermen were recently left furious after second home owners took a lead in opposing an application for a new jetty which they said would ruin the look of the picturesque village of Helford, in Cornwall.
Average house prices in rural communities last year were seven times average incomes, rising to 10 times household wages in the smallest hamlets.
Mr Taylor's report revealed that more than 50 per cent of people living in cities aspire to own a home in the countryside.
The public purse is now funding almost half of new home building, demonstrating the extent to which the government is shoring up the construction industry amid a historic slump in private sector development.
The public and private sectors are providing almost equal numbers of new houses, with the public sector responsible for about 45 per cent of home starts over the three months to the end of February.
FT Thursday 26th March
Until property stops being used as a commodity it doesn't matter how many houses are built in the public or private sector. The old addage of 'invest to nest' still stands true for most of us. However with all the media hype on 'buy to let' in the recent past preceded by the 'right to buy' there needs to be a complete change of philosophy in the way property is viewed and used if the housing situation is to ever get sensible again.
Oops, there goes another pink pig...
Attitudes are changing fast at the moment, so hopefully your pink pig may land with a bump very soon! There is whisper that policies at PDC are being created that will support for homes4locals. Tax 400 has been suggested for second home owners (apparently Tax 200 is not deemed to be high enough to deter).
Hopefully this will mean positive times are ahead. We certainly need to avoid any futher outcomes such as the 'Worth' scenario.
So far as I am aware nobody has tried to put a figure to the effect of imposing a planning permission requirement on second homes. I can hardly be taken seriously until its supporters come up with a plausible methodology for calculating the expected effect. If it is effective it will increase the valueof existing second homes, thus rewarding their owners, and reduce the value of non-second homes, thus punishing locals. Is that really what its supporters want?
Worth Community Property Trust news
Housing in Worth has made the national news again with the former craft centre hitting the headlines. The Worth and Harman’s Cross Parish Plan expressed the overwhelming desire of the community to see more jobs and more affordable housing in the Parish. It begs the question as to why we have lost jobs at the Craft Centre and still have no community housing at Football Field in Worth.
Your Community Trust has been working very hard for three and a half years to get the five affordable houses built. However, ‘the system’ has made it much easier for the developer to strip assets from our village than for the Trust to create new community assets.
For example, the development at the craft centre is on brownfield land and the new house crosses the village development boundary. The developer had minimal conditions placed on the development. In contrast the Trust had to undertake a costly contaminated land survey and wait fifteen months for the Council to agree a “section 106” legal agreement.
And what about finance? We found that the major banks will not finance community affordable housing developments – nor will they give mortgages to community shared ownership schemes. Despite the low risk involved such schemes are “unusual” and so they can not be funded. If only they had taken that same cautious approach with their mainstream mortgages and loans to developers. But we have found that the Charity Bank and the Ecology Building Society are two ethical organisations that have been very supportive, as has Synergy Housing.
And grants? In addition to the magnificent contributions from our local community, Purbeck District Council and the Tudor trust have also been very generous in making very significant donations. We now need a Government housing grant to fill the final gap. The Government do have a system to give affordable housing grants to housing associations and to private developers. But they do not have a system to give such grants to community groups. So in early October 2008 we agreed to act as a national pilot that would “set up a new system and give us a grant by the end of November 2008”. We spent a week filling in all their forms and sending requested information. But it was February 2009 before the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) even looked at our “pre-qualification questionnaire”. The HCA has now told us that we do not fit their criteria for shared ownership housing grants - so we have to submit a new business model based on rented houses. This requires more expensive consultant input to undertake whole life cost studies of the houses. There is some slow progress but still no sign of an actual grant offer – still some months away we fear.
Our board continue to work hard to make this happen and we are learning how to jump over ever bigger hurdles!
Does anyone think that the houses on the craft centre site in Worth will sell now?
Anyone thinking of buying them must have been put off, and I cannot see the developer selling them as affordable housing.
Of course they will sell in due course, if not "now". The housing market is cyclical and it is quite normal for sales to come to a halt when it is going down. Remember how long the Haven maisonettes in Swanage took to sell. Rather unfortunate for the developer but they do not get a lot of sympathy do they?
I actually meant, with such national coverage, will anyone buy with the threat of an angry local painting all over the front door or hurling a brick through the window.
'Of course they will sell in due course, if not "now". The housing market is cyclical....' (10.26)
Do you mean 'cyclical' in the sense that “What goes around, comes around,” is the American definition for Karma.
Karma—from the root kri, "to do"—is the means by which you become the architect of your own destiny. The word karma literally means deed, but implies the entire cycle of cause and its effects. According to the law of karma, every human action—in thought, word, or deed— inevitably leads to results or consequences, positive or negative, depending upon the quality of the action.
Karma deals with causality. A specific action leads to a specific result. A positive act will lead to a positive result, hence, to the experience of positive events, may it be in this life or in future ones. On the other hand, negative acts will unavoidably sooner or later lead to suffering. This is the Law of Cause and Effect of itself, because the result will unavoidably correspond to the nature of the cause. For example, if you plant a seed, a certain kind of plant will grow from this. From a bean seed, a bean plant will grow; from an apple seed an apple tree will grow and not any other kind. The effects of a deed, word or thought, sometimes are immediate but in some cases many days, months, years or lives elapse until the precise time comes about. Buddha said: "Our good and evil deeds follow us continually like shadows."
So was it a negative act that the Cafe and Craft Centre was converted into dwellings?
Or was it a negative act that local people used a few chosen words to show their frustation?
Who decides on what is good or bad Karma
Jeepers, Buddhism. If this thread is down to that level I am leaving it.
'Karma—from the root kri, "to do"—is the means by which you become the architect of your own destiny.'
I know an architect who bought a Black and Decker drill and became a master at his own dentistry...
By Christopher Hope, Whitehall Editor
Last Updated: 8:15AM BST 07 Apr 2009
Under the proposals, a Conservatives Government would take planning powers for new housing developments from local authorities and giving them directly to local villages and hamlets.
Using new local housing trusts, villagers would be able to approve plans for more affordable housing if more than 90 per cent of local people are in favour.
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The plans will initially be confined to rural communities because of the need to poll a clearly defined group of local people using the electoral register.
Grant Shapps, the shadow housing minister, said the new powers would give people living in the countryside more control over the shape and size of their community.
Mr Shapps said he wanted to scotch the idea that local people in the countryside had "not in my back yard" views towards new development.
He said: "We are prepared to trust local people. If people want to keep a local post office in business by building more local affordable housing, then they can.
"The Government thinks that 'nimbyism' is stopping development but often the opposite is the case."
The plans would make it harder for developers to push through unpopular new second home developments if there is widespread local opposition.
Concern has been growing that wealthy city workers are pricing locals out of the housing market and turning communities into "ghost villages'' by buying homes that they rarely visited.
Last month it emerged that locals had daubed "No More 2nd Homes'', "Greed'' and "Go Away'' on a new second home development in Worth Matravers, Dorset.
A draft of the Conservative green paper says: "If a community wishes to propose its own expansion then it should be able to enjoy unique powers to provide itself with the planning permission required."
The trusts "will have unparalleled power to develop new homes and other space for community use, subject only to the agreement of local people".
To prevent overdevelopment, the trusts will only be able to expand a local community or village by a maximum of 10 per cent over any 10 year period.
Local houses that are built by the trusts and sold locally at below market rates would not be allowed to re-sold on the open market. It would have to be sold back to the trust.
The rural watchdog has warned that affordable housing was in short supply in rural areas despite the downturn.
Last month the Commission for Rural Communities also said that there are more people chasing each job in rural areas than in "major urban unemployment blackspots''.
Radio 4 You and Yours 7.4.09
Can rural communities survive an influx of second home owners? And how best can the new arrivals live alongside the locals?
There's growing concern that locals are being priced out of the housing market and some rural communities are being turned into "ghost villages" with an imbalance of part-timers starving permanent residents of vital services like schools, post offices and pubs.
Recently protestors in Dorset daubed slogans over a new development aimed at wealthy incomers - making it clear they weren't welcome. There's a sense that in some areas, the locals feel they're outnumbered.
But many part-time country dwellers say they bring a lot to the local community, renovating old property ,providing work for local tradesman and boosting the economy.
And who wouldn't want a second home in a beautiful part of the country if they could afford it?
So who should decide how to maintain a balance between the old and the new? Many of the decisions affecting rural communities are made by local and national government who know little about them. Should the locals be given more autonomy? And is there a way of managing the tension between the incomers and the established community?
You and Yours radio 4- hour long programme!
Strong feeling from the programme ie that local people and Parish Councils should have more say. Other ideas-to increase council tax for second homes-suggestions from present 90% to 100% and even up to 400%. CLT (community land trusts should be supported)so that housing can be kept in perpetuity for locals. Land set aside for self build. Planning permission for second homes. Only 10% of housing for second homes. Retention of local business should prioritise over unaffordable housing.
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