Across rural Scotland, people are being priced out of the places they grew up in. There are three times as many empty homes in Scotland as there are homeless children.
The Scottish Greens want a rural housing revolution: new social homes, robust rent controls, and an end to the scandal of long-term empty homes, second homes and holiday lets sitting unused while local people can’t find somewhere to live.
Community-led housing projects are already showing what’s possible in ensuring rural communities survive, but they need coherent, consistent government support to get from vision to completion, not just warm words.”
Ariane Burgess MSP
When the Scottish Greens were in government, they gave councils the power to raise Council Tax on second homes. In the Scottish Borders, we want to go further than this. Anyone buying a second home already pays the Additional Dwelling Supplement, which raises more than a quarter of a billion pounds a year. We want a “multiplier”: a third home would cost more than a second, a fourth more than a third, to discourage property hoarding.
We will also back community-led housing, local housing needs assessments, and funding that reflects the higher costs of building small developments in rural towns and villages. Retrofitting empty shops and houses, as in Channel Street, Galashiels, can create affordable homes and small business units at the heart of our towns.
