Even in Cornwall, people don't live forever. You cannot blame an elderly person who has to sell because they can no longer cope with their property for what the next owner chooses to do with it. The problem is not 'incomers' : people have always moved in and out of Cornwall. It's not even 'holiday homes which are rented out most of the time to people who shop locally, use the post office, the pub'. It's 'people who buy houses and leave them empty most of the time'. This is a new and different issue to the local chauvinism of someone who doesn't like having a neighbour who used to live in Birmingham. I live in Wales now, we have taxes on second homes that kick in if they aren't occupied most of the time, and I think it's a great idea.

Tory tosh. Have you ever sold a house before? You don’t get to sit down with the buyer and get to know them, or get to discriminate based on where they are from. The ones with the most money bid the highest, simple as. And those people are usually Londoners with high paying jobs.

@@carlcarlson983 ?? You always know the situation of the buyer, usually via the estate agent. If course it's entirely up to you who you sell to!

It's a mixed bag. I was offered a job in Cornwall back in the late 70's. The properties were cheap back then. I didn't take the job and my company moved me to Somerset for 4 years. 10 years later I bought a ruin in Brittany, the region was full of ruins as people had moved away, died or simply built a new modern home. Brits came over, renovated houses that, if left, would by now have mostly collapsed in. It revived many areas, put money in the vendors pockets , gave jobs to builders and put money in the local economy. Within the interior most are lived in all year around. Down on the coast however it's a different story, like Cornwall. A huge number of seaside homes are owned by Parisians and the like. They are empty for 9-10 months of the year and local amenities either just struggle along or shut down most of the year. I've seen the same in the Cotswolds...empty villages. Londoners just come for the weekend and bring all they need with them so they don't even shop.

Years ago I was talking to an old Cornish chap in a pub and he said you can always spot the second home owners on the internet by the way they claim that locals sold out their heiritage and if they wanted to they should sell to locals. Next you’ll be throwing out the favourite claim, that without second home owners spending their money supporting the local economy we’d all die of starvation and our children will end up in the workhouse. When let’s be complete honest about the situation. You come down, you do a large shop at an out of town supermarket before arriving, maybe go out for one meal, where the proprietor charges extortionate London prices whilst paying minimum wage to a seasonal worker and possibly buy an ice cream whilst your here.

I'll second that....from Josselin

Privilege detected

​@@antlila5300 Or maybe he just didn't like it?

@@johnmartinez7440 Likely due to privilege

My childhood home tripled in value from 100 to 300k bc of these gentrifiers

Before I left Vermont, all the rich New Yorkers couldn't figure out why they couldn't find locals to clean their ski homes and AirBnBs anymore. They couldn't understand that it was because they bought up all the homes and we all were leaving as a result.