Second homes in the city and the country: a reappraisal of vacation homes in the twenty-first century

Abstract

In the United States and across Europe, research on second—and multiple—homeownership for vacation and leisure use has traditionally analysed the in-migration of urban residents into rural locales. Indeed, this line of inquiry has been warranted for many years because of the high concentration of urban dwellers who have sought second homes in natural amenity-rich rural destinations. However, drawing on interviews with 61 second homeowners who purchased property for vacation or leisure use, this paper unravels an empirical puzzle. While second homeownership has often been found to be an urban-to-rural phenomenon, this analysis uncovers a preponderance of second homeowners who purchase secondary residences in urban locales, as well as suburbanites who purchase secondary residences in either rural or urban destinations. To makes sense of these findings, I suggest that empirical and theoretical attention to second homeownership requires a twenty-first century reappraisal to account for both the heterogeneity of second homeownership as well as the larger socio-economic conditions under which it materialises.

Keywords:

• Second homeownership
• urban
• suburban
• rural
• cultural processes
• post-industrialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Drawing on Stiman (2019) ‘I define second homeownership “by drawing upon geography, and tourism and mobility studies”. While “multiple homes” (Paris, 2010) is often more appropriate to describe some of the affluent participants in this sample who own more than two properties, most own only two, and I thus defer to the colloquial term “second home.” This is furthermore how the participants in this sample referred to their residences’ (p. 16).

2 To conceptualise rural, I draw upon Michael Bell’s (2007) conceptualisation of the ‘second rural’, or the subjective rural, a ‘rural of associations…[which] calls upon the connections we have long made between rural life and food, cultivation, community [and] nature’ (p. 409). To conceptualise ‘suburban’ I draw upon Lacy’s (2016) definition of the suburb within popular American culture: ‘suburb conjures up images of middle-class lifestyle with all the requisite accouterments—cul-de-sacs peppered with imposing homes nestled on manicured lawns, an expansive driveway, a car or two, and a portable basketball hoop…residents of these idyllic communities are [often] imagined as white and middle class’ (p. 370). Last, to conceptualise urban, I draw upon Sharon Zukin’s (2010) argument to emphasise the ways in which cities have become ‘destination culture’ for elites; a ‘social as well as physical transformation by the combined powers of private investors, the state, the media, and consumer tastes’ (p. 310). These dominant notions of urban, rural and suburban form the basis of this analysis.

3 For important exceptions see: (Chevalier, Corbillé, & Lallement, 2012; Chevalier, Lallement, & Corbillé, 2013; Coppock, 1977; Fernandez et al., 2016; Groth, 1994; Ong, 2007)

4 I argue that financial data are made available to researchers through tax and mortgage records, and the Census; one can look to these datasets to see where second homeowners are placing their money and how much they are investing. However, these records cannot capture the investments made by second homeowners in addition to investments in real estate (Stiman, 2019).

5 See also Hall and Müller (2004).

6 This is a pseudonym.

7 I contacted property owners who explicitly mentioned in their listing that they use their property occasionally as a vacation home for themselves.

8 I identified properties that met all three of the following criteria: (1) Single-family or condo homes, (2) not owner occupied and (3) listed a zip code outside of Boston for the permanent mailing address.

9 The other second homeowners from my sample purchased homes earlier in their lives throughout the 1980s and 1990s and use them, today, as second homes. These second homeowners engage with the city in many of the same ways as early gentrifiers or ‘pioneers’ (Brown-Saracino, 2010; Douglas, 2012; Smith, 1996), in that they engage in civic and political action to enhance the financial investments of their second home properties.

10 It is important to highlight that I purposefully selected urban second homeowners to interview as part of my sample; this category of second homeowner did not emerge inductively. However, the prevalence of such homeowners is garnering both academic and population attention, and second homeowners are increasing in cities across the United States (Fernandez et al., 2016; Higgins, 2013; Story & Saul, 2015).

11 Suburbanites are often more affluent, which can partially can explain their overrepresentation in this sample. However, it is important to note that second homeowners in rural areas in the early twentieth century were often wealthy urbanites (Dolgon, 2005)

12 It is important to note that second homeowners furthermore gain status and cultural value from owning a second home in both the city and the country. Both expressed gaining cultural capital from their rural and urban experiences, respectively.

13 They donate to: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Lyrica Opera House, Handel and Haydn Society, Freedom Trail, JFK Library, Boston Athenaeum and Boston Youth Moves. Furthermore, they donate to various religious institutions that they occasionally frequent while in town, animal shelters, and medical research institutions, such as Dana Farber and Boston Children’s Hospital (Stiman, 2019).

14 This is not to suggest that contemporary second home research should replace traditional second home research, however we can use this formulation to extend extant research.

15 Such research should build on extant work in this area: (Chevalier et al., 2012; Fernandez et al., 2016; Paris, 2010; Rogers & Koh, 2017; Stiman, 2019)

16 For notable new research in this area, see Armstrong and Stedman (2019).