We had an adder in the kitchen once. My mum caught it in a biscuit tin and let it go out by the beck. Outside our front door there was a vast boggy field filled with sheep, and in the autumn, deer rutting in the copse next to it. Windermere lay hidden in a dip some way off, the mountains behind it. When the wind blew we could hear the beat of the music on the tourist boats. It was idyllic, it looked perfect – but it wasn’t ours. The countryside rarely is.

I grew up in a tied house, which meant it came with my dad’s job as a forester. Rural industries have been providing accommodation alongside work for centuries. Pit owners built rows of cottages for their miners, foresters lived in cabins on the edge of the woods, slate quarriers lived in houses made with the slate they blasted and reservoir builders stayed deep in the moors for years in tin huts. Whole communities were created as the workers brought their families with them. Schools, hospitals, football teams, even orchestras sprang up. People living in these communities wouldn’t have felt isolated. But if you lost your job, if your husband had an accident, if the men went on strike, or if by some luck you managed to make it to retirement age, your house was snapped back up.

This, as the Scottish would say, is a heck of a shoogly peg. Within a few days, you could lose everything. But without this arrangement, those miners, foresters and builders couldn’t work at all. They would never be able to afford to rent or buy in a rural area – there weren’t enough houses. It’s funny really: not much has changed.

At one point, not so long ago, villages had a house for the policeman, the nurse, the school teacher. In the Highlands and Islands, they also had accommodation for the coastguard and the “BT guy”. These were council houses, often now sold off. On Skye, people are turning down job offers due to a lack of anywhere to live. In 2019 to 2020 only 4,500 social homes were built in rural areas in England, with a quarter of a million people on the waiting list.

So, was tied housing a good thing? Did it matter if the house was cold and damp if you were surrounded by fresh air? Did this kind of renting prevent population decline in rural areas? Should we think about bringing it back? Perhaps. But it’s still a shoogly peg.

There are some sectors in which tied housing still exists. About 30% of England is currently farmed by tenants. Hotels and businesses such as outdoor adventure centres provide rooms for their bar managers, chefs and activity leaders. The National Trust also provides housing for its staff. But we need more than agriculture and tourism.

Parts of Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and the Highlands have seen communities catastrophically eroded as the resident population falls. In some areas one in four houses are second homes or rented out as Airbnbs. There’s an irony here. The tourists and second homers didn’t just love the beautiful countryside, they loved the feel of the place too. They loved the pubs, the country shows, the fairs, the shops. But by buying a home to live in for only a few weeks a year, they are contributing to the demise of all that. Between 2012 and 2017, primary schools and post offices in the English countryside closed at the rate of one a month. Between 2013 and 2016, one rural pub closed every day.

We need tourists, we need Airbnbs and we even need second homers (there are places that rely on them to inject much-needed cash into the economy every summer). But we also need somewhere for everyone else to live.

In some places things are changing, with something a bit like tied housing making a comeback. In Inverness, a care home operator is building 24 affordable homes for staff and other key workers. On Skye, the Highland Council and the National Centre for Gaelic Langauge and Culture are building 17 affordable homes for people who need to live or work in the area. In Aviemore local businesses can pay a fee to a housing partnership to ensure their employees can rent new builds at an affordable rate. In the Lake District, the national park authority can impose local occupancy clauses, restricting homes to those with an established connection to the area. And in Wales, local councils are now permitted to charge a 300% council tax premium on second homes.

But do we need to go further? Maybe we should we take a leaf out of Guernsey’s book. Since the 1950s, the island, with a population of about 60,000, has had two separate property markets: a local one, for those born there or with family connections, and an open market for everyone else: the latter only comprises about 7% of the properties available.

The tied houses I once lived in were damp, far away from any kind of transport links and even further from the wider world of work and opportunity. But we loved every minute of our childhood. We didn’t own our house, the river in the garden, the fields or the woods behind us. But they felt like home. However we solve the rural housing crisis, we have to give more people the chance to experience that feeling – not least because when you love a place, you look after it.

• Rebecca Smith is the author of Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside (William Collins) To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Further reading

Tenants by Vicky Spratt (Profile, £10.99)

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton (Verso, £9.99)

Landskipping by Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury, £9.99)