MedEwok wrote:
But the village should be large enough to have at least a Kindergarten, an elementary school and a supermarket.
At least to me, that is not a village anymore but a town ;-)
The observation about village and town life being more similar than you might expect is interesting and I think has a lot of truth to it – but in terms of the practicalities, public transport is far better in towns than in rural areas so not driving remains more of an issue in the countryside. Travelling distances are also greater, so activities such as going to hospital appointments or the hairdresser become more onerous.
Everything is relative, and ‘country’ depends on your prior perspective. Some of the people I work with drive 50 miles to work one way, shop every two weeks and love it. And they stay in their homes until they’re old, with the help of their kids and other family. The solution for medical care is minor and preventative care locally, plus medevac insurance to cover a hospital-to-hospital helicopter ride in an emergency. If and when regular care that exceeds the local capability becomes necessary, then they have ‘aged out’ as the saying goes. A couple I know bought their house from somebody selling for that reason. They are in their 60s and use this as motivation to exercise and stay in good shape, helping their odds of staying in a rural coastal location for as long as possible.
500K with a 1500 monthly payment is well under 1% interest for a 30 year loan.
No 30y loans on the German retail market.
Raise the interest to 2% and the payment is not much affected.
But the value of the underlying asset backing the loan is.
As a child in my village in the UK (pop. 700), a large proportion of the inhabitants had a strong rural/provincial West Country accent; I found some of the elderly almost unintelligible. Gradually people died or moved away, there was an influx of middle class from the local town, some house building, and recently a second influx of affluent London types. This has significantly inflated property prices; moving 4km to the outskirts of the town easily saved us £400k for the same size house. There’s a couple of sports pitches and a clubhouse donated to the village 100 years ago, plus a pub, shop, school, and church, so no shortage of social life… but only if your face fits: the clubs, groups and committees are run by the newcomers. It’s actually quite sad, pretending to be ‘country’, creating the appearance of a community, without even realising there was a pre-existing country community which they killed.
For comparison, my village (or rather hamlet) in France has a population under 100. In my childhood it was about 50; many I consider as family. The speakers of the local morvandiau patois have almost all disappeared; I barely know 10 words, but surprisingly a friend in her late 20s is fluent. It’s a hilly and heavily forested area which explains the historic linguistic insularity and reputation for being backward. There are no jobs so the young leave, and the nearest town (pop. <2.000) is shrinking. Life is impossible without a car. The village population doubling in 25 years is people buying ruins and restoring them as weekend homes, then later on retiring there. This is a mix of people returning to the area, parisiens, and a surprising number of Dutch (3 houses out of 40). Without the holiday homes it would be an economic wasteland.
It’s nice to think of the countryside as a bucolic idyll of thatched cottages with white-painted picket fences and roses growing round the door, but it’s easy to take for granted the huge advances in standards of living in just the last century.
Yes, there are lots of farmers round here who give their farms to their children then live in a bungalow on the property and help on the farm until they can’t walk. At which point all they have left is watching the grandchildren play. It sounds a very nice way to get old.
The problem comes when people move e.g. London to rural Wales in later life. No social circle. Kids a day’s drive away. Then husband dies but his wife can’t drive. Or someone moves alone then has a stroke a few months afterwards. Misery. A village is probably OK, but there are lots of isolated houses dotting the landscape, some of which can only be accessed by 4×4.
In Scotland there’s a drive towards people accepting realistic healthcare – the idea being that if you choose to live somewhere isolated then you are accepting that you won’t be able to get cardiac stents or stroke treatment in a timely manner. One of my bugbears is an over-reliance on helicopters and medevac. They’re hard to park so you often need to get an ambulance to transport the patient to the helicopter. Our weather here precludes their use for much of the time. And yet, there’s a political vision that funding a few helicopters might enable the downgrading of rural hospitals in favour of larger urban ones.
@Capitaine, thanks for that write up, very interesting. My wife’s little town in Germany has been overwhelmed by suburbia but in that case the local culture survived in parallel, they have their own traditional haunts in which they speak a dialect I can’t understand, and there is a certain status to it. As an upside many of the local farmers made millions by selling half their land. Not all bad and it’s a still a very picturesque place – no dirt roads anymore and the train station is now underground.
Saving money on a house price by living only a small distance outside of town is one of those things that depends mainly on the culture – for most people there is obviously little practical downside to living 4 km away from an urban center, and it a lot quieter. The same thing is true in Italy by my observation: you can inexpensively buy places a few km outside of town, because everybody wants to live in the center of town.
@kwlf, hospitals and rural medical centers here typically have helipads on the roof, but that said I have an aunt in Rhayader in exactly the situation you describe, now widowed although in truth they moved there in the 1980s or so, so they had a good run. I believe the house will be up for sale soon.
Ours often don’t have helipads – but I think the real problem is at the patient’s home (or from wherever you get the call).
Capitaine wrote:
so no shortage of social life… but only if your face fits: the clubs, groups and committees are run by the newcomers. It’s actually quite sad, pretending to be ‘country’, creating the appearance of a community, without even realising there was a pre-existing country community which they killed.
I’m not sure the incomers kill the communities. Market forces apply anywhere.
A village like mine 100 years ago indeed had a ‘proper’ rural community. Most of the people would have been relatively poor, from families with a long history in the village, and would have worked in agriculture, either directly on the land or in an occupation associated with it.
The fundamental change is that other than a pub, there is now no employment or economic activity whatsoever. The village will survive because the houses (typically 300 years old and good for another 300) have intrinsic value, and it’s unrealistic to think that the descendants of the 1920s working classes would continue to live here, getting the bus to the Amazon warehouse 7 miles away. Incomers are essential and they are not new – without them the place just becomes a retirement community.
One hears the same tales of woe from Cornwall, but in my view the focus on housing is mis-placed. It’s not that there’s no housing, it’s that there’s hardly any (skilled and well-paid) work.
Graham wrote:
At least to me, that is not a village anymore but a town ;-)
Well yes, you’re probably right. In German the distinction between Dorf (village) and Stadt (city) is very arbitrary. Historically, a settlement had to get Stadtrechte (“city rights”) to call itself a city (or town, depending on how you translate it). This was back in feudalism and handled differently by local rulers. Some villages grew, got the right to call themselves a city, then shrunk. Some grew and were never awarded city rights for political reasons. Some were stripped of their previous rights (the latest, most notable instance, being the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, a city state, which was stripped of its statehood by none other than A. Hitler after not allowing him to hold a rally there before the Nazis came to power).
But I disgress. My home town is a community of 30.000 people and not a city. It consists of 7 different villages, the largest of which has a population of 8000, and yet nobody calls it Kleinstadt (town). It is a Gemeinde (Council) with constituent villages, despite dwarfing the nearest city (pop. 20.000) in population…
