A Newsweek brief defines it as “people who ‘buy a second home [in a rural area] and affect community decisions by being there two days a week.'”
For me, the key sentence in the story is this one:
Citiots say they’re just protecting the unspoiled idyll that they paid for.
Ah, ha. Here’s the problem. The so-called citiots paid for their homes and their own property. They did not pay for restrictions on their neighboring property owners.
Thomas Sowell describes this phenomenon well in his book Ever Wonder Why? (Hoover Press, 2006):
Many restrictive land use laws in effect turn a chance that someone paid for into a guarantee that they did not pay for, such as a guarantee that a given community would retain its existing character.
When the citiots bought their second homes, they took the chance that the surrounding community would stay essentially the same. If they had wanted to guarantee that the surrounding community would stay the same, they should have purchased all of the surrounding property as well.
