How Cornwall helps solve the housing crisis

I’m obviously being contrary – Cornwall does not solve the housing crisis – in fact, it makes it a lot worse: by making poor people homeless (of course, this has been the way for a thousand years; a thousand years of Enclosure Acts forcing the ‘common’ people out of their ‘common land’ and giving it to the rich); by allowing second homeowners to Airbnb for short-term gain instead of renting their property long-term to locals (thereby turning whole swathes of Cornwall into soulless ghost towns, empty for most of the year); by making new homes unaffordable; by having a waiting list of 23,000 for social housing*. You get the idea. Read all about it in the Guardian.

I came across this site/sight near St. Ives (where 1 in 4 properties is a holiday home) in Carbis Bay some time ago; it may be the same now, it may be finished, I can’t say, but when I saw it, it had obviously been in this condition for some time, judging by the plants growing around the area. There was fencing up all around it, but I climbed over and had a look around. It felt eerie, like a scene from a post-apocalyptic zombie film. Except there weren’t even zombies around, just a persistent seagull overhead who wouldn’t stop squawking at me. I thought it was a new type of drone security guard, cheap and very plentiful in Cornwall.

*Cornwall Council can’t really win with me – when they do build new homes, I also complain, as they like to do so on lovely fields, and burn trees and destroy wildlife, whilst there are some 2,500 empty residential properties in the county, not counting the thousands of empty buildings (from churches to fire stations) that could be converted into housing.

Previously on Barnflakes
Recent Cornwall complaints
Letters of complaint