Looking on Zillow, it looks like a beachfront house on Long Beach Island in New Jersey is ~$2.5-5 million.
Cross the street, go one house back from the beach – the differentiating factor between the two being whether there’s a view out over the ocean – and the price drops to maybe $1.5-2.5 million.
So you figure that people there basically bought a house plus a window with a fancy picture in it, and that picture cost maybe one to several million dollars.
I wouldn’t pay several million dollars for a fancy picture, but I imagine that if someone has done that, then they’re probably liable to get pissy if people go and fiddle with it.
Yeah that’s definitely a component, although I’m not sure it would even actually hurt the value. The beaches are public so they already cannot control that view. My favorite of their arguments was all of them very quickly becoming whale activists and stating with certainty that windmills kill whales.