As St Ives prepares to vote in a groundbreaking referendum to restrict second homes, there’s a surge of support for the change on the cosmopolitan harbourside

“Doesn’t that look wonderful, that little glimpse you can see? Doesn’t that look gorgeous?”

Linda Taylor is marching down a narrow cobbled street towards the harbour in the picture-postcard Cornish town of St Ives. She pauses at the end of the street to look across the water. Boats bob in the sunshine, children dig in the sand and visitors jostle along the front, on what feels like the first day of summer.

It is in every way a vision of the idyllic seaside resort. But like many idyllic spots, St Ives is facing the gradual decline of its community as local people are priced out of the property market by outsiders buying up second homes. With the situation approaching what many residents see as breaking point, they have decided to do something about it.

Next month St Ives will vote in a referendum to approve a neighbourhood plan. While the plan’s 108 pages cover a range of local matters, the eye-catching measure is to be found in section 3, point H2, under the heading “Full-Time Principal Residence Housing”.

If the plan is approved, there will be a legal requirement to ensure that all new housing in the area is for principal residence., with the owners’ status checked against the electoral roll and doctors’ registers. While out-of-towners will still be able to buy second-hand houses as second homes or holiday lets, all newly built property will be reserved exclusively for the locals.

“It’s groundbreaking,” says Taylor, who is about to begin her third term as mayor of the town. “We’re really lucky that we live in such a beautiful area, it’s recognised by a lot of people and a lot of people want to buy a slice of the lifestyle. You can’t overestimate the contribution of second-home owners to the economy, but you have to look at the bigger picture. Where you don’t have a sustainable economy, over time the town will wither away. We don’t want that. We want to maintain a thriving community, we’re trying to keep the fabric of the community together.”

It might seem perverse that a town whose prosperity is largely founded on the reputations of outsiders drawn by its rustic charm, artists and writers such as Barbara Hepworth and Virginia Woolf, who in turn laid the foundations for the chic galleries and Michelin-rated restaurants now lining the harbourside, might turn against its regular visitors.

“Most of the artists that came lodged,” says Taylor. “They stayed with Virginia Woolf. They were the first B&B’ers.”

Ask around the town, where the most recent figures show that 25% of housing is owned by non-residents, and local people all seem to have experience of the pressure on housing.

“When we were looking to buy we couldn’t afford St Ives,” says Melanie Uys, who runs an art gallery in the town. “There are no family homes at affordable prices. My friends who rent are always in a vulnerable position because landlords can bring in twice as much money for the summer months, so they only get very short-term lets. It’s steadily got worse. St Ives looks so perfect, but scratch the surface and it’s got a lot of problems.”

Andrew Mitchell has faced the same problems. “I’m 50 years old,” he says. “I was born here and technically I live at home because I cannot afford to buy here. Until I had family members die I was never going to be able to own a home in this town.” Mitchell is a local councillor and a keen supporter of the measure to restrict new homes to locals. “The view is fantastic, but what makes a community is the people,” he says.

“St Ives is very cosmopolitan, it has embraced a variety of cultures. There used to be a time, 30 years ago, when you would walk down Fore Street and hear people saying, ‘Bloody Emmets [tourists]’, but not any more. So it’s not that we’re small-minded or against growth or development. If you’ve got the money to buy two houses, then I’ve got no problem with that, but there has to be a position to say enough is enough. The second-home market creates misery for people in St Ives by pushing up house prices artificially. It’s a ‘financial cleansing’ of the local people. My concern is that in another generation St Ives will only be open for the summer because the local population will be living somewhere else.”

These pressures are far from unique. It is estimated 1.6 million people own second homes in England and Wales, with 26,000 homes in Cornwall and Devon owned by non-residents.

The St Ives initiative is not the first. Lynton and Lynmouth in Devon passed a similar measure in 2013. That approach was held up as a model for future policy in a recent report by the Rural Housing Policy Review group, which highlighted the growth of second-home ownership as a particularly worrying trend that promoted the “exclusion” of local people and fuelled a “vicious cycle of decline, leaving behind an ageing and increasingly vulnerable population”.

Cornwall County Council has been so alarmed at the effects of second-home ownership that it has sought a change in regulations to oblige anyone wishing to turn their property into a second home or holiday let to apply for planning permission. On the other side of the country, figures released last week in a survey by the estate agency Humberts showed that 5% of homes on the Suffolk coast were registered as second homes in 2015, with some parishes recording 40% second-home ownership.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Mitchell is in favour of the referendum resolution. Photograph: SWNS.com

While second homes have traditionally been viewed as holiday bolt-holes since the trend first emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there has been a more recent move to buy houses in rural and coastal areas as an investment, mirroring developments in the London property market.

Toni Carver, editor and proprietor of the St Ives Times and Echo, recounts the story of a friend who lives in a row of four former fishermen’s cottages in the town. On one side the neighbouring property is a holiday let, the other two properties in the row are owned by an accountant, who visits twice a year, and a banker, who appears occasionally to check on his investment.

“With prices of £1m-plus and parking spaces in the town going for £60,000, it’s unrealistic,” he says, “there’s a huge economic disparity.”

Chris Balch, a professor of planning at Plymouth University, agrees. “The real problem is speculation and the delivery of housing as assets,” he says. “It’s the equivalent of the tower cranes in London. Is planning going to provide an answer? If the government has taken the stopper out of the bottle and let the genie out to allow local people to have a say, then we may see a slight correction.”

Plymouth University provided a rare voice for second-home owners in a study released in December which showed that as a group they thought they made a positive contribution to local economies while being sensitive to the potential negative social effects of second-home ownership.

The multitude of property maintenance vans clogging up the narrow streets of St Ives testifies to the contribution that holiday lets and second homes make to the local economy.

“Part of the charm is that people are spending money on these places,” says writer Clive Aslet, a former editor of Country Life, “but the money isn’t being created locally. Ideally these honeyspots would be full of people living there all the time, using the local shops and working locally. But we’re not like that in this country; the real problem is that the economy is distorted and all the wealth is in the south-east. It’s a dream that we can have that sort of community but it’s not a reality.”

Sitting in a cafe overlooking the beach at St Ives, Andrew Mitchell worries about the referendum. “You know it could go either way, don’t you?” he says. “I hope it doesn’t get kicked out, but St Ives is a place where something this wonderful could be rejected. When we were having the talks about the Tate gallery here, its director, Nick Serota, said, ‘What’s going on here? They can’t decide between a world-renowned art gallery or a car park?’”

Second home hotspots: average prices

North Devon £255,000

Cornwall £247,000

South Hams (Devon) £339,000

West Somerset £241,000

Isle of Wight £229,000

North Norfolk £252,000

Suffolk Coastal £294,000

Pembrokeshire £178,000

Rutland £293,000

South Lakeland £255,000