Second Homes and Leisure

New perspectives on a forgotten relationship

Trudie Walters, Tara Duncan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138928954
• eBook ISBN: 9781317400264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Second homes (variously summer houses, shacks, baches, cottages, dacha) are a popular cultural phenomenon in many countries and an emerging trend in others. They are inextricably linked to tourism, recreation and leisure, and yet the fundamental relationship between second homes and leisure often appears to have been overlooked by researchers in the area. This book seeks to address this absence, bringing together an exciting collection of research from around the world. Drawing on examples from Canada, Japan, Morocco, Costa Rica, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, this book highlights the interdisciplinary nature of second home research in the leisure field. The book describes the nexus of second homes and leisure from a variety of perspectives: planning and policy, historical, social and cultural. It is an essential work for those interested in new cultural viewpoints on second homes and leisure practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Annals of Leisure Research.

Critical commentary: second homes

Chris Paris

Centre for Housing, Urban and Regional Planning (CHURP), University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia

This paper reviews the topic of second homes by bringing together perspectives from housing studies and leisure studies and advocating better collaboration between the two. It provides a critical overview of the literature on second homes, identifying key themes, and urging that future work avoid problems of reification, simplistic comparisons and superficial policy analyses. Suggestions for future work include more research on second homes in cities, transnational second home ownership and economic dimensions.

It is impossible both practically and logically to identify meaningful barriers between ‘housing’ and ‘leisure’ markets, [so] it is a matter of personal choice, partly influenced by legal and regulatory conditions, whether and when a particular dwelling is used as a second home for personal consumption and/or let on a commercial basis to other leisure users (‘on holiday’) or private tenants as an investment. (Paris 2011, 30)

1. Introduction

The aim of this critical commentary is to explore the topic of second homes with reference to the interests of leisure researchers. My interest in second homes derives from a background in housing studies, and my lack of specialist credentials in leisure studies made me nervous about approaching this task. But I have undertaken extensive research on second homes over 20 years, explored diverse literature and written about the topic, albeit with a housing focus (Paris 2011). So I hope at least to stimulate more collaboration between housing and leisure studies specialists working on the topic.

Both leisure studies and housing studies are inter-disciplinary, subject-oriented specialisms, involving numerous disciplinary subgroups whose members are as much oriented towards their main discipline as to the ‘studies’ (especially regarding government assessments of research quality). Both of them are relatively recent academic specialisms, still weakly institutionalized, facing many threats to their intellectual legitimacy and lacking clear and coherent theoretical underpinnings. The rationales for academic associations dedicated to housing and leisure are remarkably similar. Thus the UK-based Housing Studies Association (HSA) and Australian and New Zealand Association for Leisure Studies (ANZALS) both promote the study of their areas of specialism and combine theoretical and practical perspectives in that task (http://www.york.ac.uk/chp/hsa/about.htm; http://www.anzals.org.au/about/anzals-mission). They both aim to bring together scholars, practitioners, governments and other interested parties to raise the profile of their topics. They organize conferences and want to sustain and enhance links with related specialisms. Both are associated with journals published by Taylor and Francis; Housing Studies and Annals of Leisure Research (the latter being owned by ANZALS). It makes virtually no difference to the associations’ and their respective journals aims if the words ‘housing’ and leisure’ are switched between listings.

The perspective of any particular ‘studies’ arena (housing, planning, leisure and gender) can make it easy to ignore other aspects of the phenomena under observation. This is certainly the case regarding second homes, as housing studies tend to ignore leisure dimensions and leisure studies tend to ignore housing markets. So although I come from outside the mainstream of leisure studies, wherever that wandering river runs, I hope my critical review of the topic of second homes and my arguments and suggestions about future research are relevant to leisure researchers.

2. Numerous ‘studies’ interacting around a topic

My interest in second-home ownership grew during the 1990s after moving to Northern Ireland, as the booming growth of second-home ownership met with increasing local political protests. Initially, I never considered the topic to be about ‘leisure’ because I was interested in second homes as a significant element within changing dimensions of housing markets. Demand for second homes was an important driver of demand for housing construction in hot spot areas such as the Causeway Coast (home of tourist icon, the Giant’s Causeway). And the number of second-home owners was increasing rapidly in the UK and Ireland, with strong growth in the ownership of second homes overseas.

I soon appreciated that scholars from many different perspectives had written extensively about the topic, with some of the best work from scholars working in leisure and tourism studies. I quickly found Second Homes, Curse or Blessing? (Coppock 1977). Many chapters in that book revealed overlaps between housing studies and leisure studies; I was especially struck by Dower’s (1977, 160) suggestion that second homes ‘are at the point of overlap between housing and tourism – neither squarely one or the other, but having the nature and implications of both’.

Despite the rich and diverse literature on second homes, most housing researchers had little interest in the topic, apart from exploring ‘problems’ caused by second-home owners, typically in ‘rural’ areas. This was especially the case within the UK where housing studies is dominated by a social policy orientation focussing on housing ‘problems’ and social housing management, with research priorities and funding opportunities dominated by government agencies and charitable foundations. There is also a strong policy orientation across housing studies internationally because research funding in most countries comes directly or indirectly from government agencies, though there is also a strong vein of critical writing, relating housing studies to wider theoretical debates (see especially Kemeny 1992; Clapham 2005).

The expansion of housing studies in the UK in the 1990s reflected the growth of new ‘professional’ teaching programmes, mainly in former polytechnics. Housing education courses typically emphasize inter-disciplinary and job-related relevance, like leisure and tourism education. But some housing education programmes have closed in recent years as have some formerly strong urban/housing research centres. So there are more parallels with leisure studies, where ‘the number of degree programmes dedicated to leisure and the number of students taking them have declined in recent years’ (Carr 2013, 277).

3. Critical overview of the literature

This section combines and updates my recent literature review oriented towards a housing studies audience (Paris 2011) and an overview by Müller and Hoogendoorn (2013) oriented largely to leisure and tourism researchers.

Coppock’s book was cited extensively in the inter-disciplinary literature after 2000; six books in particular provide an excellent introduction to the topic for any interested scholars, regardless of their background and perspective (Gallent, Shucksmith, and Tewdr-Jones 2003; Gallent, Mace, and Tewdwr-Jones 2005; Hall 2005; Hall and Müller 2004; McIntyre et al. 2006; Williams and McHugh 2006). Most of these contributors are from longer-established disciplines, especially geography and sociology, and inter-disciplinary ‘studies’ approaches, including leisure and tourism, rural studies and planning. I was struck by the diversity of scholarly conceptualization of the topic of second homes, with many writing as if the nature of second homes is self-evident and the meaning of the term self-explanatory. I take strong issue with such assumptions.

The first theme in my own review reflected my primary interest in housing markets and housing provision as I argued that housing scholars had exaggerated the importance and significance of ‘the home’ in the singular. The idea that the home is a special place becomes problematic when we consider that many households own numerous dwellings with attachments to more than one physical dwelling or place within which their various dwelling types are located. Second, therefore, I argued that second (and multiple) home ownership can be a crucial element within life course and family investment and consumption strategies. The overlap with leisure studies is that second homes – in the form of buildings on land – are distinctive leisure goods combining investment and consumption qualities, with potential for capital growth.

My third theme was the role of second homes in lifestyle choices, including why people buy second homes. My strong conclusion is that we must reject any uni-causal explanations and accept diversity and change. The term ‘second homes’ is used to refer to different relationships between people and physical dwellings, so we should conceptualize ‘second homes’ as a form of dwelling use, but not a class of dwellings. Imagine that I buy a house in New Zealand from somebody who had lived there permanently for the previous 30 years, but then use it as my base for occasional weekends and regular summer-long trout fishing holidays (I wish!). It was her permanent home, it becomes my second home; the dwelling is unchanged, only its use has changed.

Other themes explored in my review were also taken up by Müller and Hoogendoorn (2013) and can be brought together under four broad headings:

• The impacts of second homes on communities and places, especially rural areas

• Internationalization and mobilities

• Economic dimensions

• The future growth of second homes

The literature on the impacts of second-home ownership on communities and places shows the extreme difficulty of isolating the impacts of growing second-home ownership in localities from other changes affecting those places. Such changes, moreover, need to be related to their wider historical contexts. Thus the transformation of agricultural production and associated labour shedding across most of the Western world has resulted in the development of the ‘post-productivist’ countryside, where land remains a vital element of production; the settlements which once housed agricultural workers have been re-used, and distinctively in Britain are now largely gentrified enclaves of the middle and upper classes, ruthlessly protected by the most restrictive land-use planning regime in the world. However, I consider that it is wrong to conceptualize changes in the countryside as ‘rural’ phenomena unless the term is used only in the ‘common sense’ way as identifying areas of low population density. The urban–rural distinction has no meaningful analytical substance, though it can legitimately be used to refer to official spatial categories (see, e.g., Hoggart 1990).

Much of the literature on second homes is riddled with reification: ‘the treatment of something abstract as a concrete or material thing’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica). I have used the term ‘second homes’ so far as a loose umbrella term simply to indicate a broad shared area of interest and body of literature, and I have no problem with continuing to do so. But there is a problem when we forget that this is actually a conceptual term rather than a reference to particular things: none of the physical objects used as second homes are necessarily, only or always used in that way.

British planning conflicts over dwellings in the countryside lie at one extreme of a continuum from restrictive to open-slather planning regimes. We need always to be aware of differences between various national and local policy regimes to carefully specify the characteristics of any local studies and avoid unwarranted generalization deriving from what may be unusual or even unique cases. The impacts of second homes on communities and places in many countries almost invariably combine elements both of leisure and tourism and local or regional housing markets. Increasingly, too, there is evidence from countries from Norway to Australia of growth in second homes being led by developers and/or that the nature of second homes in many places is changing from artisanal non-commodified ‘huts’, ‘shacks’ or ‘cottages’ to fully commercial, often exclusive and expensive dwellings.

Second homes, as such, cannot have distinctive environmental impacts over and beyond the fact that buildings used as second homes have such impacts, because they are not necessarily used as ‘second’ homes. Some developments aimed at sale to second-home owners are in environmentally sensitive areas and cause untold damage, but that is due to the construction of those dwellings in those places, not to their use as second homes.

Müller and Hoogendoorn (2013) noted growing interest in the internationalization of second homes during the mid-1990s, stimulated by European Union expansion, cheaper air travel and growing affluence. They suggest this is likely to continue, with growth in countries ‘that traditionally have fallen outside the gaze of second homes research’ (p 362). I agree, especially in the Asia-Pacific Region and Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries). But the growth of transnational second-home ownership may also bring greater risks to those involved, as dreams of a happy life in sunny Spain were destroyed for many Brits who bought before the global financial crisis and subsequent collapse of tourist-oriented local housing markets (Paris 2011). The wider theoretical context for a consideration of internationalization of second homes, I believe, is the changing nature and complexity of mobility (Halfacree 2011; Hall 2005; Urry 2007). Migration has changed, from a one-off life-changing event to diverse complex patterns of frequent movement between places, at various spatial scales and through diverse time frames. The ways in which primary, secondary and other ‘homes’ are used can be complex and varied and future uses difficult to predict.

Müller and Hoogendoorn (2013) were surprised at the limited interest in economic aspects of second homes in the Coppock volume but noted the attempt by Gallent, Mace, and Tewdwr-Jones (2005) to assess the diverse economic dimensions of second homes. This remains a major research gap, with few economists taking an interest in the topic, despite clear indications that demand for second homes can have major impacts on local housing markets. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: [Re]positioning second homes within leisure studies
• 1. Critical commentary: second homes
• 2. Host community perceptions of the contributions of second homes
• 3. Second home leisure landscapes and retirement in the Canadian Rocky Mountain community of Canmore, Alberta
• 4. Summering in Japanese hill stations: an analysis of villa ownership in modern Karuizawa
• 5. Trouble at home: diasporic second homes as leisure space across generations
• 6. Second homeowners hosting friends and relatives
• 7. The luxury of leisure and pleasure at the New Zealand second home
• Index