An available substitute is a great reason to allow a particular service to not be provided in a particular location.

If rural environments weren’t accessible it becomes much more important for cities to be more quiet. Because rural environments are available, cities can trade some silence for some pretty extraordinary economic advantages.

Building skyscrapers and moving millions of people around every day is noisy work, but it provides one heck of a boost to the GDP.

If cities can be quieter for free, they should be. If being quieter costs cities one of their inherent advantages than people who don’t like that can choose a different environ.

Sure. But we still should consider both sides of the equation. Even in a city, not every loss of silence is worth every gain of productivity or other city advantages.

Also, in this case we are not exactly talking about Manhattan, but about houses with gardens in Canberra.