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

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.