I took a ferry yesterday with a friend to visit a beautiful island, and I noticed, as is usual in such places, that the most spectacular houses were the ones right on the water. I mean, the other island homes were all lovely, but one look at the houses on the water made it clear that their inhabitants are operating in a whole different economic realm.
Which makes sense. Not only are the views from the shore spectacular, but such land lots also constitute a distinctly limited commodity, a result of simple geometry: The number of houses you can fit on the perimeter of any landmass, even a modest sized island, is far smaller than the number that can fit in the interior.
And because my mind works in odd directions, the first thing I asked myself was how all this would play out in a four dimensional world. In that case, the “real estate” on an island would be some sort of solid volumetric shape within the three dimensional “surface” of a hyperspherical planet.
The shore would not form an undulating shoreline, like it does for islands in our world, but rather some sort of undulating two dimensional “shoreplane”. A lot of houses would be able to fit on the volumetric interior surface of the island, but far fewer houses would be able to fit on its bounding shoreplane.
In such a world, the total number of houses on even a smallish island would probably be vastly greater than could ever fit on one of our islands. And from our perspective, there would also be room for a lot of houses on the shoreplane.
But you can be sure that the people who lived right on that shoreplane, with their fancy views of the volumetric waves, would be the wealthiest of all the hyperfolk.