This little cabin my uncle started to build was envisioned as a getaway, but never finished.
The second home market is still very much alive, but it’s nothing like it used to be.
In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather bought a little farmhouse on a country road just a mile from a train station in a Hudson River community. He wasn’t wealthy, but he was well-to-do. And he sent his family there every year for the entire summer to get them out of the Bronx, joining them every weekend. That three bedroom house housed his children, their children, and their children right up through the seventies.
When they weren’t there, it was empty.
My dad bought farmland in a forgotten area of upstate New York in the 1960s, and after a few years, built a small two bedroom cottage there. We didn’t go to Disneyland. We didn’t take expensive vacations. Instead, we went to our house. We spent many weeks at the cabin every summer, and my children did the same. It was our place and we loved it. We opened it up every year, and closed it down every fall.
Wealthier families than ours had summer homes on the coast, by a lake, or near winter sports. They were all seen as good long term investments: they would enjoy these places, and someday sell them for a substantial profit.
Nowadays, if buyers are fortunate enough to be able to afford a vacation home, it’s likely that they aren’t content to simply have it for their own use and wait for a return. When they aren’t there, they want it to make money. Now.
Short term rental sites online have made it easy to become a vacation host. And in the Catskills, where I am, the most desirable properties for this use are either older homes in a quaint village, or houses in the countryside.
It’s causing a lot of soul searching in those communities, because there was a huge uptick in such uses since 2020, and that causes issues.
The obvious problem are inconsiderate visitors. One small village had to send the county sheriffs to break up a loud party that somehow included a car fire. Neighbors have complained about noise, ATVs tearing through their property, or a visitor thinking a weekend in the country meant shooting guns from morning to midnight.
The less obvious problems involve short term rentals’ impact on the community. A part time house means one less family in the community. That impacts schools. That impacts businesses and services - volunteer fire departments, community service, businesses that rely on steady customers. It even impacts elections.
It’s not all bad. Short term rentals drive up property values, which is overall a good thing for the people who are already here, but makes an area less affordable for new buyers. The vacation houses are well kept: they have to be, to draw the biggest rental.
It’s a question of numbers. In a small town, how many short term rentals can exist before the community is irreparably changed? If every other house is a vacation home, what happens to the small town relationships that make a community?
It’s a question many small towns and villages in the Catskills are tackling. It’s become clear to them that this isn’t an issue that’s going away soon. Some have declared a moratorium on new short term rentals while they study the question. It’s new territory, and it’s a tightrope walk.
Small communities benefit from the influx of new people. But without careful thought and reasonable regulations, short term rentals have the potential to permanently, and not necessarily positively, transform the very communities their owners were drawn to in the first place.