Giving Stay-Cation a Whole New Meaning: Summer Homes Just Across Town

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The Globe has published a trend piece on folks with summer homes near their regular homes. Citing convenience, established summer activities in the area, and high gas prices as reasons for summering close to home, many people are beginning to buy summer homes less than 30 minutes away from their first.

Maybe this Bostonist is just jealous because she never had a summer home growing up, but the idea of having two homes--in general, and especially within a 30-minute radius--seems a little preposterous. We're all for driving less, of course, but we're not really for developments that displace wilderness and full-time residents only to stand empty much of the year (if these summer homes had full-year residents, which they don't seem to, they'd be a little more tolerable).

If you're into this idea, you can check the Summer Village website to find a home close to home of your own. The site boasts, without a hint of irony, that "The view from your cottage home is what New England looked like before it started getting carved up for highways, office buildings and shopping malls"--not to mention unnecessary summer cottages 30 minutes from home! Maybe we'd have more wilderness to enjoy if we weren't carving it up for the convenience of rich folks... or maybe that's a preposterous idea.

What seems to be the real problem here is a lack of neighborliness outside of defined boundaries. The article claims:

[A] place like Summer Village offers the kind of neighborhood ambience that so many suburban families say they no longer find in their own communities these days.

Perhaps if people stayed in their own communities over the summer, or invested a little more in them during the year, that ambiance wouldn't be missing. And if neighborliness and a change from the ordinary are what you want, why not befriend a family that lives across town and swap homes over the summer?

It seems more valuable to make your home a better place to be all the time than to flee home for a few idyllic week(end)s a year. Sure, we all feel the need for vacations--but is it really a vacation if it happens so close to home? And is it responsible to develop as much property as possible in the interest of enabling rich people to spend summer nights somewhere close enough for them to drive (or even bike) home from?

One Summer Villager says, of her search for a summer home in Maine and New Hampshire, "I realized that even if I found something, I didn't want to spend my summer weekends driving." Again, we applaud the reduced driving, but it sort of makes us wonder: if the goal is not to drive and to enjoy all the conveniences of home, why not, uh, stay home?

So what do you think, Bostonists? Are local summer homes (or summer homes in general) sensible, or silly? And are you just against them because you wish you had one?