[robfitz]

There are plenty of river ports/quays with power and water hookups. If you want to houseboat it, you really only need to move when you want to dump the septic tank (and in some areas, not even that).

The "good" spots are highly desirable and usually privately owned (or on a very long-term lease), and you often need to buy a boat to get the mooring spot beneath it. (A buddy of mine in London ended up with 3 boats while upgrading his mooring spot.)

Another options is to vagabond it, where you move your boat to a new area every week or two -- this is usually unserviced, so it's more like camping, but lets you use unofficial spots and is free.

(The last option is to find goofy loopholes. E.g., in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat. Sounds stupid but a surprising number of permanent city boats are there on some sort of loophole.)

[autoexec]

> in some areas of the Thames, you can create a nesting habitat for an endangered bird on your boat, and then once the bird settles in, they can't force you to move, since doing so would destroy an important habitat.

Seems like the fix for that would be to force you to leave the boat where it is, but to stay off of it so as not to disturb or disrupt the bird's habitat while at the same time leaving you responsible for rent and the boat's upkeep. That way you'd have an expensive boat you can't use but must also pay for and maintain. The plus side being that nobody in their right mind would try to attract endangered birds, the downside being that in order to avoid the costs, a cruel person might harm the bird if it happened to build a nest on their boat naturally (not sure how often that actually happens when people aren't intentionally building habitats for them).

It's possible that discouraging that kind of thing just isn't worth it. Maybe the people taking up space with their houseboats aren't as big a problem as there not being enough nice habitats for a struggling species, and the loophole is a net good for the restoration of the bird population without being a major problem for others.

[jorvi]

People would never choose the bird over not paying rent for nothing, especially because the people doing this trick would not be the one’s with a lot of money.

Here in The Netherlands, bats are protected. Bats nest in the ventilated outside walls of houses. According to law, if you want to insulate your walls and it is suspected you have bats, you now need to pay an inspector €3000-6000 just to check. If you do have bats, they need to be lured out and re-nested with another expensive operation. What people do instead is flush their walls with low grade toxins so the bats get scared off.

[pjc50]

Spoken like someone who's had a traumatic run-in with a bureaucracy.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Your solution is worse in every way.