Review of “Privileging Place: How Second Homeowners Transform Communities and Themselves”

Scholarship examining inequality and place is expanding beyond its initial focus on poverty and disadvantage to also address the ways the affluent create and preserve places of privilege. This turn reflects increasing income inequality and the concentration of wealth among not only elites but those in the middle- and upper middle-classes—high-income professionals and those benefitting from well-timed home ownership or intergenerational wealth. A surge in scholarship on gentrification details how this affluence is remaking cities, while work on amenity migration and rural gentrification attends to how retirees, remote workers, and second homeowners are changing small towns and rural places. Meaghan Stiman’s Privileging Place extends and combines these lines of inquiry by examining the motives and actions of second homeowners in both rural and urban contexts. Drawing from extensive qualitative research in Rangely, Maine, and Boston, Massachusetts, this concise and accessible book details what drives second homeowners to these places and how their presence amplifies and complicates place-based inequalities.