Is there enough of the good life to go around?
According to the Telegraph article "Beachfront property: All year in the sun, all day on the beach - all yours for £55,000," apparently "a villa by the sea, where you step out from your garden straight on to the sand, is how nearly half of us visualise our perfect holiday [vacation] home." This information comes from a report by the group thinkproperty.com.
It’s probably a safe guess that the figure for US residents is probably at least 50% too, especially if we take the Rapidsea analysis of the New York Times list of the places to go and assume that its representative of places that people actually do want to visit.
Think about the impact of this statement. In these two countries alone, we’re talking about one half of millions upon millions of people who think that a beach house is the ideal escape. MILLIONS.
Let’s take a rough population estimate of 60 million people in the UK. Half of that is 30 million who want to live in beach houses. If there are four people per family, that’s 7.5 million beach homes that people are working towards. If each lot has 100 feet (30.48 metres) of ocean frontage, we would need 750 million feet, or 142,046 miles (228,600 km), to satisfy this need. Can we do it?
According to Wikipedia, the length of the coastline of the UK is only 11,073 miles (17,820 km) long, which is longer than most other countries its size because of its being surrounded by water and having a unique shape. Even if the entire coastline were a desirable and buildable beautiful beach, we would be only 8% there. The CIA World Factbook shortens the coastline to 7,723 miles (12,429 km). That puts us at just over 5% for the UK’s population. They’re going to have to clearly look abroad.
Don’t look to the United States. We don’t even have 1% of the coastline we need to satisfy a 50% desire. According to the US section of the Factbook, the U.S. has a coastline that is only 12,380 miles (19,924 km) long!
After you subtract out the less desirable, unbuildable, or environmentally sensitive areas, there will never be enough land in the world to satisfy people’s desires to live on the beach.
These are extreme and necessarily unrealistic situations, but they cannot be ignored. They lead immediately to several conclusions: 1) the beaches are great, and we love them; 2) we will never have enough beach to go around; and 3) we may want to take policy measures that allow the greatest use of existing beach property by the largest number of people (i.e., exclusive ownership should not be encouraged, and perhaps should even be discouraged).
The third point could be extended to perhaps asserting the very unpopular notion that maybe we should even put some of the beach property back into the public trust. Of course, nature is doing just that on its own in Texas.
We must also take the appropriate measures environmentally to protect the areas that we love for ourselves and for the even greater number of people that will be born based on predictable exponential population growth. This includes, but is not limited to, not building seawalls to support new buildings.
Then there is the additional Rapidsea response: we MUST make people aware of how they are programmed by everyday images of escape and paradise that are thrust in front of us so that we can properly decide for ourselves if we really do want to visit the places that society tells us to. Reading the many posts on this blog will quickly show what we mean to people.
Think about the opposite of sunny paradise and ask yourself if you think that "bad" weather really makes you sad or if it’s because you never see happy people in everyday stormy images. Instead, everywhere we look we see people with their arms in the air on a beach, so that’s where we want to be.
Maybe if people start actually perceiving what we see, we will be able to turn inward and realize that there is much to love about where we are now, even if it’s on the beach.
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Posted on December 15, 2007
Filed Under Beaches, Real Estate, Utopia |
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[...] Yet, we know here at Rapidsea that these images are only pushing a lifestyle that is spatially unattainable by the hundreds of millions of people that view it as the i…. [...]
[...] Yet, we know here at Rapidsea that these images are only pushing a lifestyle that is spatially unattainable by the hundreds of millions of people that view it as the i…. [...]