Retirees bombarding our beautiful rural seaside area

School fete!

Might have been interesting if the OP had come back to see if the pot she stirred had boiled !!

Yes indeed. One wonders is it someone out there poking "the oldies" with a stick for a reaction - or a researcher/journo needing stories about retiree migration or the way we feel about 'outsiders'.

Maybe they want want us all to be rich, set in our ways, racist, intolerant, reactionary, stupid, uninformed etc. It's the way we have been painted by many, Remainers especially - given some people have mentioned Brexit.

I hope it's not some pensioner-bashing project.

OP, where are you?

Interesting to see the words Key Workers. When we were young marrieds, recently returned from nearly 3 years in sunny California, we lived in a new town. Key workers, nurses, police, fire service workers, teachers etc were given cheap housing. The rent was very low and the house was well maintained. We only left it when I stopped being a key worker and became a mother and we bought our first house. I wish people today could benefit from this. A lovely temporary teacher recently left DGS's school because she couldn't afford to live here, though a permanent job was on offer. Houses are going up here in the S.E. in every available space, but no affordable housing, council or otherwise.

You have to bear in mind the mindset of the person writing the article

True, janeainsworth

Son had to find a rental in London when he moved there for work a few years ago. I'd read about Brixton being 'up and coming' trendy', 'lively'' 'the place to be', etc.

Places can have all the trendy artisan shops and coffee bars in the world but they tend to retain their sleazy underbelly, if they had one to start with. One evening after looking at a rental property in Brixton son had bottles thrown at him by a gang congregated under a bridge, and the next time he ventured there to see a band, there was a fight outside every bar he used and he and his friends felt intimidated by threatening language.

Sometimes a nice place has a veneer which fools some people (writers/researchers) who fail to look at the whole picture or hang around for any length of time.

A million miles away from South London, a couple we know are leaving the idyllic (looking) little SW village they retired to because it's too quiet and there are few facilities.

Sometimes you have to make the best of the place you live. Things like the Times list have us imagining everywhere is better than the place we call home.

Paddyann in 40 years of living mainly in Scotland I cannot think I have ever once seen a 'no trespassing sign'.

I wonder what it is that makes people in your area erect such signs? Maybe there's a certain person they wish to keep out.

About fifteen years ago a plot of land in our village was sold to developers for affordable housing for keyworkers. Sixteen semis were built. The land had belonged to a late farming friend of ours who was very community minded and wanted the small estate to benefit those who could not afford the inflated prices of housing in the Cambridge catchment area. We went to the open day and chatted to nurses, carers and teaching assistants who were being shown around.

The houses were all snapped up.

Fast forward to now.....House prices rose dramatically before the 2008 crash and most of these houses were sold on. I keep an eye on Right Move out of nosiness and they're still changing hands with not a mention of keyworkers. They are priced at the current market value.

So is a 'keyworker' priority a golden opportunity for people to get on the housing market and make a quick profit?

SueDonim

We are selling up and moving to a small seaside town later this year from a large city. Reading the opening post I can now understand why my dear friend who is now in her 70s has so many problems making friends with locals. She moved to a very small town near where we are going 10 years ago to be near her son and daughter and her only friends are people who have retired and relocated to the countryside. It doesn't bother me or OH as we are quite self contained people anyway but the resentment from the opening poster is quite shocking.

Fifteen years ago my nephew's GCSE maths teacher was travelling around M25 for the pleasure of teaching him. She travelled round a quarter of the motorway in the morning and a quarter back in evening. She had a car accident after a term or two, and gave the job up. So he had no maths teacher.
Key workers have to live somewhere, and are often not well-paid enough to commute long distances (and may work hours too unsociable for public transport)

Sorry folks I haven’t come back to the thread as I’ve been out all day.
The amount of responses and points of view are quite amazing. I’ve obviously put my foot in it and been, for many people, offensive and very politically incorrect.
We can all have our own private thoughts and I expressed mine based on observations .
All who responded are perfectly entitled to their own thoughts and points of view. As is everyone in this country a free person and entitled to live wherever their desires and employment take them.
I did ask Why do people retire to an area they have little connection with?
Thank you to those who sought to enlighten and educate me. It is a question I have often considered and I feel quite humbled by a few of the comments. It has certainly made me think hard about the whole issue of rapidly changing communities.
I would like to apologise if my words came across in a very ham fisted way. My private thoughts are not my public actions. I have never been unkind or ungenerous to newcomers. Most people in this area go out of their way to welcome, this includes knocking on the front door, introducing our selves and taking a food offering etc.
?

Nice to hear back from you Specs
Would you care to share where you live? Lily65 has her sweepstake bet on Filey?

But why do you assume Specs that there is no good reason for moving into the area- years of happy holidays, personal links, friends or family members nearby?

Wow why shouldn't people no matter who they are live where they want I feel for immigrants if this is any thing to go by

I think I’ve already revealed to much?. I might get linched on the way to collected my pension ?. Yes, we still have a post office ?

SueDonim I was beginning to worry that, if I decided to visit Scotland, I may find a No Trespassing sign on the M6, or, if I sneaked in, be deported as an undesirable.

I grew up in Liverpool. 50+ years ago we moved to a small town 20 miles away. The houses were cheaper and the area was more rural, and many other Liverpudlians did the same. I admit that the influx changed the town. New housing estates began dotting what had been almost a village consisting mainly of terraced houses.
Many of the local people deeply resented, or actively hated, the 'incomers', and who could blame them? We completely changed the place where they lived. Some of the ex-city-dwellers considered the locals, with their Lancashire accents and dialect words, to be inferior, unsophisticated, even a bit stupid. We certainly had a big impact on the place, which hadn't changed a lot for many years.
I'm glad to say that we are all one community now, but it took a long time for some people, from both sides, to get used to each other. Sadly, we rarely hear the 'auld fowks' talking in dialect, which seemed like a foreign language to the Scousers. Like most places, modern communications have watered down local accents.

Callistemon, it depends on your ancestry. There are secret scanners at the junction of the M6/M74. If they detect any English blood in people travelling by, automatic NO TRESSPASSERS signs pop out of the verges and central reservations.

The signs aren't visible to anyone of non-English ancestry so no one will believe a word of what I write, except other English people. It's all a plot by the SNP, of course.

SueDonim DH has some Scottish ancestry, as well as Welsh and English - he's a bit of a mongrel really.
Perhaps he could leave me at a lovely hotel in the Lakes while he goes on the whisky ancestry trail

I'm sitting here with a smile on my face, daydreaming about what it must be like to freely roam the countryside, countrywide - Countless natural features here (US) are privately owned, from river banks to deep ravines, waterfalls and streams, beaches and bluffs and breathtaking views - Just across the road .. Where I'm not allowed to go .. Because it's fenced off -

Scotland must be awesome!

The days when people lived in the same place for generations, rarely travelling more than a few miles away, came to a fairly abrupt halt during the Industrial Revolution. Further changes followed. The introduction of the welfare state in the last century provided those too old to work with more options than depending on their younger family members to support and, eventually, care for them. Further changes followed. Some of these changes were beneficial for some and less so for others.

There's no turning back the clock and, no doubt, future generations will look back to the first decades of the twenty-first century and think how easy it was for us not to have had whatever contemporary problems they will have in the future.

Rapidly changing demographics in a community or neighbourhood is always a challenge for both local and regional governing.

For instance our neighbourhood went from overflowing with young families to the aging of those families to the point where our neighbourhood school closed for lack of enrollment.
My daughter lives in a suburb of Victoria BC that is growing so quickly the schools are overflowing and children going to classes in portable buildings. Downtown Victoria is so overpriced that there are most young people are moving further out to the suburbs, with a longer commute into the city to jobs. Downtown there are speculative buyers, short term rentals and out-of-country owners. That and quite a few over-50's that were lucky enough to live there before it got too crazy.

Our provincial government last year implemented a 'speculative and vacancy tax' on properties to try to force more of the empty downtown properties into long term rental market. This applies to Victoria, Vancouver and a few other areas where prices are so overinflated that it is causing changes to the local economy. All those rich people owning homes can't get a coffee at Starbucks because there are no employees that want to commute 2 hours for a minimum wage job.

It's not an easy issue to manage, and there is a worry for local governments to maintain a certain balance between established and newer residents.

Hold on a moment - are you telling me your lovely neighbours are choosing to sell to outsiders and yet you're blaming the buyer?

CanadianGran and GreenGran78 thank you for taking the time to share your knowledge and experience. Both responses are helpful when trying to understand rapidly changing communities .
Off to aqua aerobics now. This naughty old Gran has to keep her joints working. Perhaps Gransnet is keeping my mind working.

Where I live, every spare bit of green land is now covered in new housing ‘to ease the housing shortage’. However, many of the houses are larger than needed for local people and are being bought by people currently living in London who are renting out their London homes and moving here - we have excellent transport links to London. This is ‘flooding’ our overloaded schools, doctors, and hospitals (don’t mention the traffic jams!) and in no way easing the housing shortage.

Me neither! Miseries