Sixteen Volts

A standard joke in Finland used to be that most people really want to live in a house instead of an apartment --- with the tacit assumption that this house is located in the middle of the city next to a shoreline. Heh. One type of people who annoy me are people who want to live in the city but at the same time believe that they are entitled to certain comforts of living in the country. You can believe what you want, but when you want to shape the city more to your liking in this respect, you are bound to violate the rights of other people. For example, people who claim that no new buildings should be allowed, because they already own homes and scarcity will make these homes more valuable. (This is the real reason for opposition of all new construction, even though it is never said out loud.) There are already millions of square kilometers of countryside for people who prefer that sort of lifestyle, so it would be nice if they let us city mice live in an actual city.

I couldn't be happier whenever a new skyscraper is announced. Each time I practically raise my hands like Homer Simpson and go "Woo-hoo!" However, when they announced the new landmark skyscrapers to be built near the city hall (clarification: these are not the Absolute building which I blogged about before, and which is going to look like a giant toothbrush), some people complained that these buildings block their view of the Lake, which is something like five miles away from where they live. You might think that such complaints would end up directly in the trash, but apparently they succeeded and these new buildings had to be made something like ten stories lower. And even more absurdly, today I read in the local newspaper that the builders of a new 40-story luxury hotel in Yorkville, Toronto had to compensate the nearby kindergarten their loss of two hours of daily sunlight by paying them 2.1 million dollars. That certainly gave me a pause. What the hell is this?

Myself, I have always believed in the simple principle that your property rights end at your property line. The idea that you could somehow own the whole line of sight from your property all the way to the horizon sounds totally absurd to me. But apparently some people believe that their entitlement to freely see the horizon somehow trumps the other people's right to build on their property. Total bollocks. If you happen to be lucky enough so that your neighbouring properties don't block your view to something nice, good for you, but I certainly wouldn't say that you have some kind of a natural entitlement to that.

Even more absurd is the claim that you are somehow entitled to direct sunlight. Anybody who believes something this absurd is free to move in the middle of nowhere to enjoy it, but certain density and height of construction are natural aspects of city life. You might almost think that the big bad corporation forced the little kids to learn and play their schoolyard games in total darkness. I can't see any other way how the compensation for this could be 2.1 million dollars. And there is this thing called electric lights, which you could try sometime now that it has been around for what, a century? Most apartments in the city probably don't get direct sunlight except for a few hours a day, and that's a good thing at least in the summertime. Maybe they should all sue the surrounding buildings and ask for millions of dollars in compensation.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, April 05, 2006 at 10:12 PM