Abstract
Meaghan Stiman’s Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves provides a new take on issues related to gentrification and amenity-driven development by concentrating on an often-overlooked group of gentrifiers: second homeowners. This focus is relatively novel in the sociological literature on gentrification, which historically has tended to look at the impacts of white, middle-class in-migrants to lower-income urban communities of color. While a spate of recent books has looked specifically at gentrification in rural communities (e.g., Farrell 2020; Pilgeram 2021; Sherman 2021; Stuber 2021), these works are also focused mostly on those who relocate to these communities as more permanent residents, versus those who are self-consciously part-timers with limited investment there. Stiman begins by pointing out the degree to which second homeowners have been altering both urban and rural landscapes in recent years, a trend that accelerated significantly with the coronavirus pandemic. The demand for vacation homes has strained housing markets across the United States, but Stiman argues that it also strains communities and creates internal tensions that are not easily resolved. The book presents a comparative case study that investigates suburban residents who own second homes in a community in rural Maine, or pieds-à-terre in Boston. Stiman aims to elucidate who second homeowners are, why they choose to recreate in the places they do, and how their choices advantage both themselves and their home communities, while simultaneously disadvantaging the receiving communities where they invest in limited, often self-serving ways.
The research is qualitative, but slightly different between the two sites. Stiman conducted 37 interviews and a year of ethnography in Rangely, Maine, visiting people’s homes and seeing firsthand the places where they spent their time and money, as well as conducting significant participant observation in the community and experiencing multiple aspects of local life. The Boston fieldwork is less comprehensive, including 24 interviews conducted mostly by phone, as well as interviews with local leaders, archival data, and much more limited participant observation such as attending community meetings.
Although Rangely and Boston are the focus of the fieldwork, Stiman does not limit herself to simply these two field sites. Stiman recognizes that in order to fully understand who second homeowners are, it is also necessary to understand the home bases that they are periodically leaving. Thus, the book begins not in either the urban or rural landscape, but rather with the suburban locales and the impetus for escape. Part I unpacks the participants’ sense of discomfort and dissonance in their wealthy suburban hometowns, tying their desire for second homes directly to what Stiman refers to as their "place identities," which are at odds with their suburban realities. Stiman argues that her participants feel strong identity attachments to either rural or urban spaces and that their pursuit of second homes is a "place-identity project" that allows them to cultivate this identity while simultaneously retaining the privileges they enjoy in the suburbs. She describes this motivation as arising from a confluence of nostalgia for places where they had lived in the past and the privilege of having the means to "buy a place identity through second homeownership” (p. 41). As she goes on to show, privilege hoarding is a big part of this story. Despite their suburban ennui, Stiman’s interviewees maintain their primary residences in order to preserve exclusive access to schools, jobs, health care, and other elite and high-quality institutions. As Stiman poignantly describes, in their hometowns they invest resources into the structures and institutions that they refuse to support in their vacation locales.
From here, the book unfolds in two additional substantive sections that unpack second homeowners’ relationships to and impacts upon the places where they feel at home, but do not live full-time. Stiman describes their various attempts to downplay class status and emphasize positive impacts on the communities, but also their disconnection from local year-round residents. She describes the often insidious ways in which their place-identity projects influence how they do or don’t invest in the local communities. In the rural setting, they support institutions and structures that help to maintain their sense of rurality—including peace, quiet, simplicity, and unadulterated—but often exclusive—access to nature. At the same time, they go to lengths to oppose the kinds of investments the full-time community needs, including diversification of the economy, affordable housing, and upgrades to infrastructure. Not only do these dynamics create toxic social divides, but through their use of power and resources second homeowners contribute to impoverishing the rural community and limiting year-round residents’ access to opportunities, institutions, and resources. In the city second homeowners similarly consume and commodify particular types of elite culture, again contributing only to those institutions that they value. In the process, they contribute to neighborhood change, rising housing costs, and eerily empty residences that undermine neighborhood cohesion and collective efficacy.
Throughout the book, Stiman treads a thin line between understanding her affluent participants and gently critiquing their negative effects on the places where they recreate and invest in limited ways. It is hard at times to feel much empathy for people who care so little about their impacts on the less-privileged residents of the places they invade, but Stiman does her best to treat them fairly and respectfully. This is a major strength of the book, along with the depth of the research.
Its main weakness is mostly embedded in the uneven methodology, as well as the limits of the particular suburban sample. At times I questioned the degree to which the rural and urban vacationers were truly two sides of the same coin, as they differ in multiple ways, including the amount of wealth needed for their place-identity projects as well as the amount of time they spend in their second homes and communities. The rural case study, which includes more comprehensive ethnography and in-person interviews, also feels much richer and better developed than the urban case. This is in part because the urban second homeowners are nearly impossible for Stiman to pin down in Boston, as they visit their second homes in much less extensive and predictable ways. I also questioned whether it was possible to own a second home that isn’t part of a larger place-identity project—particularly in the case of very wealthy individuals who own multiple vacation homes in different locations. This particular sample felt a bit less generalizable to me than Stiman asserts.
Despite these lingering questions, Stiman succeeds at shining light on an important component of both rural and urban community change, gentrification, and inequality. Privileging Place is an important contribution to both rural and urban gentrification literature and does a great job of showing the increasingly complex linkages among urban, rural, and suburban places and communities. It is a necessary read for understanding the current pressures on housing across the nation, as well as the impacts of rising inequality and the coronavirus pandemic on communities that are desirable for a diverse set of reasons.