The Cornish seaside town of St Ives has been turned into a ‘theme park’ after being swamped by tourists with locals being evicted to free up Airbnb rentals, it emerged today.
Homes for sale in the town, especially those on the harbourside, now range between £700,000 and £1million, with the average price now at £440,000, more than 17 times the average salary of Cornwall’s year-round residents.
Families who have lived in St Ives for generations are being forced out as millionaires bank up land or homes, renting them out for up to £7,000-a-week.
‘At times, people in the town feel that they are just operatives in a theme park,’ said Stefan Harkon, a St Ives RNLI lifeguard for many years, adding: ‘We work in an area but we can’t live in it.’
‘It’s the law that needs to be changed,’ said Jo. ‘The loophole on second homes not paying council tax or business rate must be closed and a tourism tax brought in on second homes. Right now it feels like a pressure cooker that came to the boil with Covid and the G7 Summit. People are telling us they’re being evicted from their homes to make way for Airbnbs.’
There is a growing campaign to bring in a ‘tourism tax’ for those buying second homes and a limit on Airbnb properties in a town where up to a third of children on one estate live in poverty.
‘We have a town where the rich people come to on holiday, when in some part of St Ives more than a third of children live below the bread line,’ Camilla Dixon, the co-founder of the First Not Second Homes campaign group, said.
‘It is having a detrimental effect. We depleted our social housing stock when they were sold in the 80s. Because the value of land has gone up, developers have been land-grabbing and land banking to make more money. It means genuine social housing development are being priced out.’
She added: ‘It became even more obvious during the pandemic when it all got out of hand. Now everyone’s building extensions, converting lofts and every square metre they can to turn it all into holiday lets. The appeal to make money that way is just far too tempting.’
The campaign group, which has held silent social-distancing-compliant peaceful protests on The Island throughout the pandemic and in the run-up to the G7 Summit in neighbouring Carbis Bay last June, is calling for ring fencing to give priority to local people over out-of-county incomers, more social and affordable housing to be built and, more importantly, more political commitment at all levels to deal with the second homes and non-tax paying holiday lets issue.
St Ives Town Council admitted there is not much it can do with its tiny budget and even bigger constraints but insisted it will review its neighbourhood plan and the impact of tourism.
It is also lobbying Cornwall Council to let it develop land the larger authority is sitting on even though it has been earmarked for social housing, and is campaigning for a limit on Airbnbs in hotspots like St Ives as has happened in places such as Amsterdam or Barcelona.
The issue of second homes in St Ives is so acute that in 2016 residents voted to ban new-build housing from being second-homes, with 83 per cent in favour. According to Rightmove, average house prices in the town are now at £440,000, more than 17 times the median annual earnings of someone in Cornwall.
Houses for sale in the town, especially those on the harbourside, regularly appear for sale with price tags ranging up to £700,000 or £1million.
Despite its £1million homes overlooking the harbour or Porthmeor Beach, St Ives sadly boasts some of the poorest neighbourhoods in Cornwall. Some 36 per cent of children living on the Penbeagle estate live in poverty. That’s 92 children out of the 255 living there.
According to the Children’s Society vulnerable children in Cornwall are more likely to receive free school meals than five years ago. Data from the Department of Education shows that by the end of the 2020-21 school year, 57 per cent of Cornwall’s children in need were eligible for free school meals – up from 40 per cent at the same point in 2016-17.
St Ives also faces a shortage of rentals; in 2021, while there were more than 1,000 properties in the town available for short-term holiday let, there was only one long-term house available to rent.
How can most of those who live on some of the poorest estates like Penbeagle, afford to stay a week at Sunset House, the former council house demolished to make way for a £6m house overlooking Porthmeor Beach and now rented out to holidaymakers for £7,000 a week.
St Ives’ popularity as the quintessential Cornish seaside town has never waned since and the number of visitors has kept going up. So much so that visiting St Ives in the summer can be a hellish experience.
The small streets are rammed, finding a parking space is an art form in its own right and battling through crowds of tourists doesn’t make visiting the harbour town the most enjoyable experience.
Yet it is easy to see why it’s is so popular with holidaymakers, as well as visitors from across Cornwall. Fishermens’ cottages recognisable for their moss-covered roofs crowd around a quaint little harbour where brightly painted boats rest on the sand at low tide.
The light so prized by artists the world over is beautiful, and turquoise waters shimmer gloriously and invitingly, while sandy beaches, museums and galleries, famous arts schools and a varied and well-established foodie scene all contribute to make it the tourists’ magnet it is today.
And that’s where the problem lies. St Ives relies on tourism to such an extent that it’s become an addiction. The town has the second highest visitor-related spend in the UK, with tourists spending £85million per year.
Around 540,000 day trippers and more than 220,000 staying tourists visit St Ives every year, with the tourism industry accounting for around 2,800 jobs in the area – that’s almost one in four people who live there.
In turn this has created its own set of problems. Over the past two years it has all come to a head and locals, priced out of their own town so the little housing stock there is left can make way for holiday lets and second homes, have had enough.
Stefan Harkon has seen the town he calls home change over the years and its addiction to tourism grow – so much so that he fears that unless there is a strong political will for change at all levels, round and round we will continue to go and the young people of St Ives, and by extension Cornwall, will keep having to leave in search for better job prospects elsewhere.
‘We need quality jobs and more affordable housing,’ he added. ‘We need to invest in our young people and their future in whatever way we can.
‘They need to have a sense of ownership of their town for if they don’t feel that the community where they live appreciates them, we’ll only see a continuation of this loop we’re in and the brain-drain will continue.
‘You’d think it’d be a no-brainer for tech companies wanting to choose locations like St Ives. Perhaps the universities and colleges should look at having other campuses in places like St Ives, but at the moment all we have is a one-can narrative that is all about tourism.
‘The outlook is pretty bleak for young people in our county right now. Tourism has become the new fishing and tin mining but you can’t get a mortgage or a career on seasonal jobs. So round and round we go.’
This is a leitmotiv we have heard repeated several times by residents, often on low income, living at the top of the hill, away from where the wealthy holiday in their second homes for often less than six weeks of the year, yet servicing an industry that feeds off that out-of-county wealth.