Privileging Place

"Over the past several decades and increasingly since the beginning of the pandemic, second homeowners have left a distinctive mark across both rural and urban America. As wealthy elites reallocate capital into housing investments other than their primary residence, they extend the breadth of their influence to places as different as the backwoods of northern Maine and the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill. Across these varied geographies, the purchase of second homes has become a social problem, placing pressure on housing markets, igniting political tensions, and putting strain on local community dynamics. While this movement of capital may be in part motivated by financial returns, this alone cannot fully explain what motivates second homeowners, nor does it capture the depth of their influence. Privileging Place examines how place-identity-which is to say, a felt identification with a particular kind of place-leads many affluent people to shift a portion of their capital and their lives to a new place and to exert an influence on that place in a particular way. Drawing on interviews with over sixty second homeowners as well as community observations from two years of field research in Rangeley, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, Meaghan Stiman looks at the ways in which place-identity motivates the movements of a particular subset of second homeowners, namely, the upper-middle class. Belonging to the top 20% of American income earners, these second-home buyers are predominantly white and tend to concentrate their wealth in suburbs and other affluent, resource-rich areas. In Privileging Place, Stiman shows that, for the upper-middle class, second home ownership is a way to promote an identity for themselves through the place where they buy their second home (whether rural or urban). But because these projects are second homes, developed on the side while still holding onto the valued resources of their suburban primary residences, Stiman argues that such place-identity projects rely on further deepening inequalities in urban and rural places. To the second homeowners, these are not places to work, go to school, or contribute to community life, but are places to imagine a version of themselves as urban or rural people and to imprint their version of urban or rural life onto the community where they live part-time. By tracing the way upper-middle class values and practices unfold between secondary city and country homes and their suburban hometowns, this book offers a detailed look into the spatial concentration and diffusion of white, upper-middle class privileges in the United States"--