As somebody who keeps a very close eye on house prices across Snowdonia, I can tell you that its housing market has neatly bifurcated. There are areas that the incomers don’t want to live in, which are still incredibly cheap. And there are the areas that incomers want to move to, retire to or have second homes in, and these have become insanely expensive. This is creating a problem for long-term rural families in the area, because the places popular with incomers tend to be of the housing stock that would traditionally have been places they would have raised a family. Yes, you can still buy a shop in Dolgellau for next to nothing but the four bedroom place on the outskirts of the town or up into the foothills of Cadairr or the Rhinogydds will now cost an amount that local families are never going to be able to afford. This creates a ghettoisation that to deny is a form of gentrification takes a particular focus to achieve.
Even this is slightly missing the point, though. The type of gentrification that I am speculating about is something new owing to a dislocation in working practices. To look for examples of it in existing population movements is to misunderstand how this kind of abrupt shift works. Nothing exists until it exists, then it can rapidly become pervasive. In the same way that the popularity of the motor car brought with it new ways of consumption and working (such as dormer villages and out of town shopping centres), the popularity of home working is likely to bring new patterns of living accommodation.
