Hacker News Reader

Comment by Erik816 | Hacker News Reader

Nope. If you can afford to live on the waterfront and enjoy the view, but never use your boat, are you morally obligated to sell your house to someone who will be out there fishing or skiing every day?

Land is bought and sold on an open market. Everyone can decide for themselves what is most important to them and what they can afford. One factor behind living in a major city is certainly easy access to in-person employment. But there are a ton of other factors (restaurants, culture, sporting events, community, etc.). If you are willing to pay a lot of money to be close to those things even if you don't use all of them, that's your choice and it's perfectly ethical.

View on HN

I dislike this particular example because waterfront views aren't necessarily tied to boat accessibility. I have relatives in Long Island that live five houses from a marina and have absolutely no water view what-so-ever, however they have exceedingly good access to their boat which they sail regularly. I like the gist of your argument but the specifics are pretty questionable to me and I'm struggling to think of a similar fair argument that doesn't also have the "under-utilizer" reaping some direct benefit from the same quality that the "proper-utilizer" would fully exercise. The easiest example for me to think of is public transit, a lot of people make no use of public transit for their work commute but still use it when going out for the evening or get a benefit from it through their children's usage. City nodes tend to specialize pretty efficiently, the fact that people who want to live near a movie theater often compete with people wanting to live near transit is due to the fact that those attributes aren't nearly as independent as you'd think. Theaters and entertainment venues in general tend to clump around good public transit accessibility. The waterfront view and the ability to easily fish are two different services, but they're supplied by the same object so it isn't particularly easy to separate the two[1].

1. I mean, unless you're talking about Boston in the 90's where the Charles was a pristine beautiful river that only an absolute madman would ever dare to fish on or some other similar pollution driven limitation of services... but that also shifts the original point since fisherman have no desire to live close to the Charles (and might actually be harmed by having to boat up and down the Charles every day when compared to living in Chelsea or Southie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com