Retirees bombarding our beautiful rural seaside area

And what of the 4 households evicted for this cash buyers project?

How can it be a good thing... when this isnt happening in isolation so where will those 4 households go?

These are your tradespeople, shop workers, pharmacy staff etc that apparently the incommers are going to keep in a job

Callistemon then you are just as bad as us! You wicked people moving around the country, how dare you!

notanan you said: "apply some logic. How are locals to "benefit" from the worldly wise ways hmm of incommers if they aren't there any more." I would suggest that you are the one who needs to 'apply some logic' In your Op you said: "Many of us are related, have long working relationships with each other, our children went to school together, we have kept local traditions going, supported countryside sports, football, rowing etc. In other words we have deep understanding and ties with each other and the land. We know the skeletons in our neighbours cupboards and that also bonds us." which would seem to imply that the 'indigenous' people are there still. If you are saying they 'aren't there any more' what is the problem, that bird has flown?

Callistemon the style of victorian house in question was built to accomodate staff as well as owners. They were never built to house just 2 people!

How can four affordable homes becoming one very unaffordable one be a good thing.

And who said that the conversion was "sympathetic", and even if it was, what good to the community is a museum just for two???

Yes, they will have money to spend. Most of it will be the very large sum they have from selling a house in a better paid, more expensive property area and with their larger capital sum....

Well, I can tell you that people who live in large towns in the North and the Midlands can look at property in seaside tons but probabaly cannot afford to buy it, if their lifestyle is modest/ordinary.

Coastal property every where tends to be very expensive. I looked a few years ago, to see what OH and I could get if we sold our homes. To live in a house of similar size, which ticked our boxes - reasonably big garden, (or at least a decent plot) driveway and non-estate being three of them, we just couldn't afford them, or would have had to spend a huge sum doing them up.

I imagine people in some parts of the south can buy in desirable coastal areas, and perhaps people who sell up in desirable suburbs of big cities houses but that is not true of everyone in the UK. Coastal property is at a premium - if you want a few facilities in the area too.

Head ruled heart for us and we bought in a new area but still within range of our children and DGC. So, you are safe Specs. We won't be moving near you any time soon.

One couple have bought up a house that had been 4 flats and converted it back to a massive victorian house

Am I alone in thinking that is a good, rather than a bad, thing? Restoring a Victorian house sympathetically is surely better than some of the dreadful conversions into flats that took place in the 1960s or 70s or even later.

My view is personal and I do think that more affordable housing is needed also.

Housing developers now have to include social housing mixed or low value houses mixed up with more expensive houses.
Nah only if the development is over a certain amount of units. A series of smaller developments = no social housing component.

They are looking for a different lifestyle after years of being on the treadmill
City dwellers are not the only ones who worked hard prior to retirement. Rural retirees worked hard too, and are amongst those being evicted for cash buyers to turn their building into a grand designs project!

I am sensing an awful lot of extrapolation notanan from your personal experience which may be perfectly valid in the instances you quote but cannot be assumed to be the case everywhere and with everyone.
It can be very dangerous to extrapolate from the particular to the general - you will be proved wrong as often as you claim to be proved right!

Nonnie apply some logic. How are locals to "benefit" from the worldly wise ways of incommers if they aren't there any more.

Craftyone give it time. Now that our more picture perfect villages have become gentrified and mini London suburbs... people are looking further affield for their "bargain projects"

JE funny you mention tradesmen actually. This is something the incommers who completely took our a village near me complain bitterly about: there ARE NO TRADESMEN THERE. There used to be....... when they could afford to live in the area!

Now they are all squabbling over out of town tradespeople who wont do full days on site as the roads in and out are so conjested that they would loose money sitting in traffic if they aimed to get on site first thing! They make more doing a few smaller jobs nearer home.

So now there are a tonne of half gutted ex bungalows and ex deconverted flats and some of them are giving up and putting these uninhabitable husks of houses back on the market for more than they paid for it intact to claw back what they spent so far.....needless to say these uninhabitable carcasses arent selling. The NEW newcommers, funnily enough, dont want to live in a now predominantly newcommer town either, so have set their sites elsewhere

but local people are the ones selling their homes to ' outsiders' aren't they?

No. For the most part it is their landlords. Or their landlords relatives when they die.

A lot of these type of properties are bought 2 at a time, i.e. 2 semis, amd knocked through. So instead of previously 2 affordable family homes you now have one huge exclusively expensive redeveloped one.

One couple have bought up a house that had been 4 flats and converted it back to a massive victorian house.

Planning does generally frown upon reducing housing stock but these people know the loopholes. And depending on how it was classified in the first place it can be done. 4 affordable homes become one expensivs one.

Its also hsppening to bungalows, previously saught out by average income retirees who want to convert them to make them suit their needs as they age.. but now they are being gutted and extended out and up making them multilevel and unaffordable/unmanagable. So long as there is already one converted on a road the others can argue for planning.

We've moved around too, Nonnie (work, redundancy etc) and I did ask DH why we're still here years on instead of moving to the coast (not as incomers, more as 'returners' after 40 years).
He replied 'Inertia'!

yes maw I am moving soon, away from a small village which is not suitable for someone who will need buses and local shops
craftyone I have never understood why older people do want to "Escape to the country" to, perhaps, an isolated house with an acre of garden.
All too soon they may find they would have been better off in or on the edge of a small town or even a large village where there may be the amenities they need within easy reach or on a bus route.

I agree it is bad that locals can't afford to buy houses in their own area, but house price rises can't all be the incomers' fault, surely. When we moved to a market town (admittedly not a poor one) we didn't choose the price of our house so as to 'outcompete' locals. Anyone could have bought it. But I do think it's very sad that there are villages such as one we visited a while ago on the coast where only one house is lived in all year round, so there are no shops or services any more. There may be many reasons for a community failing, but it is a real shame. Some places in Cornwall are voting for local plans that ban new homes being used as second/holiday homes; perhaps more should follow their example. But, again, they admit that holidaymakers spend money and help the economy, so you can't really say one side is good and the other bad.

notanan you said "And sweet jesus.... being pushed out of your home broadens your mind? Are people for real?" Was that in response to my "If travel broadens the mind surely meeting people who come from other places does the same?"? Because I can't see any other comment it could relate to. Where did I say anything about being 'pushed out of your home'? For goodness sake, if you have an argument about something why not stick to it instead of inventing something which is not there!

I have lived in many different places so must have been an incomer each time but I never experienced any such nasty people who resented me. Was I supposed to stay where I was when redundancy hit us instead of going where the work was? Should we have turned down promotion and not moved? Some times we moved to more expensive areas and sometimes to less expensive ones. Not sure what kind of horrible person that makes me.

yes maw I am moving soon, away from a small village which is not suitable for someone who will need buses and local shops. Not far at all, I could cycle to my new smaller house on my electric bike. My present house is being bought by a younger version of me, who lives a few miles away. We don`t tend to get many `townies` here because it really is not one of those chocolate box village green places. People are not rich here and houses are modest, community is fantastic

I am moving to a small market town, not coastal and a tad closer to a dd. The same community really in that it would be the same large supermarkets and banks, however my aim is to walk or cycle to the nice local shops, to help keep them alive

JenniferEccles, yes, they will have money to spend. Most of it will be the very large sum they have from selling a house in a better paid, more expensive property area and with their larger capital sum and their increasing numbers driving up the demand and prices for houses, locals can no longer afford to live in the area - and when they go so do all those services the retirees expect to spend their money on.

Specs I think you need to bear in mind that those retirees you complain so bitterly about will be contributing to your community in a positive way.

You say that locals in the main are on fairly low wages. Well these newcomers (especially those from London and the south east )will have money to spend in the shops, pubs, restaurants, as well as providing work for tradesmen with home renovations etc.

Give them a chance. You will probably be pleasantly surprised at how much they contribute to your insular little community.

SPECS you should get your eyes tested ..this is a beautiful world and you don't own it...ever watched the first episode of the Vicar of Dibley...shock she was new and a woman ...they didn't want her either...no..no.. no ..no ..yes

You are just about to move I believe Craftyone
Without compromising anonymity, how far are you moving? And is it to a town, a rural area or seaside town?
Many older people retire to be nearer their children so that they can help with school runs or babysitting.
Moving within one’s community may be impractical.

This is a common issue in rural areas but local people are the ones selling their homes to ' outsiders' aren't they? You can't blame townies for wanting to retire to the country. They are looking for a different lifestyle after years of being on the treadmill. Isn't the real issue that there are not enough affordable homes being built and offered to local young people and that is a political issue.

I am a relative newcomer to GN and empathise with the opening post here, I can see that it is private musings and thoughts being expressed on public forum. There is an awful amount of nasty vitriol on some of the following posts. I find it quite shocking that words come out as though they are spat at the op.

We have to face facts, if there were good jobs in these lovely places, then people would stay. If house prices had not gone skywards in the SE then people might not be tempted to cash in. If older people were encouraged to downsize within their community, they might never move away. If buying family homes as holiday homes was banned then maybe families could afford to stay where they grew up. On and on but nothing is worth that vitriol and nastiness that I see

Where I live, many of the lovely old Victorian villas have been snapped up by the More-Money-Than-Sense brigade and immediately turned from homes into fortresses.

Established old hedges are ripped out in favour of high and solid brick walls topped with spikes, equally high electronic iron gates back with sheets of black steel, CCTV cameras atop the gateposts and a vivid notice slapped on the gate warning of security, infra-red alarms, surveillance equipment, tresspassers-will-be-prosecuted, etc.

Vehicles (the inevitable massive 4x4 of course) with blacked out windows silently slip in and out of these places and we rarely see the new occupants. It's as if the village has been taken over with alarming stealth by aliens from another galaxy......

"The trouble with some of these coastal resorts is that the older retired outnumber the younger residents" You're not kidding when we went down to visit my mother before she died, we were often heard to exclaim "look a young person!" when they were occasionally sighted

The other problem is from my own observations and those of a friend who lived on the coast the driving is truly shocking (from some from that older demographic) Not all.

Just remember my maternal grandparents retiring to a Sussex coastal town from where they lived in Kent. My mother remarked the road where they had relocated to was already a haven for widows, and sure enough in due course my grandma joined their numbers. My mum observed at that time, perhaps it wasn't the wisest move. Eventually, we sold our house bought a larger one and grandma came to live with us for a couple of years before she died. Then blow me down what did my parents do on retirement, move from Surrey to the Sussex coast and history repeated itself again and my father died first. However, my mother had built a life for herself down there, more so than my grandma I think.

Some towns benefit from gentrification. One such is where my son bought a small terrace house to live in. It was an industrial housing overspill small town/village until it got a preservation order on areas of it, and private builders built some nice new houses. It's now a mixed community with some local employment, some old 'overspill' residents, and some newcomers who prefer a small town/village to the city.

The balance of population is such that any old or disabled people will not have too much difficulty finding home help or personal carers among the younger residents who want to work.

The trouble with some of these coastal resorts as places to retire to is that older retired(and second homes owners) outnumber the younger residents so that it's difficult to get domestic help. My mother used to live in such a place before the younger people moved away so she was okay but now the population seems to be in sort of ghettos class by class.

Housing developers now have to include social housing mixed or low value houses mixed up with more expensive houses.

I believe that there are still some idyllic places to retire to which are also affordable but they take some searching out and they will not be in the South or South West!