Turned everything into a co-op and killed all the landlords?
Maybe we should try that outside of a video game, too.
Aren’t coops basically democratic condos? In Sweden we have “bostadsrätt” which are condos governed by a democratic resident association. They’re good for democratic control over housing, but they still require a mortgage and they’re still subject to market speculation. Some of the apartments can be rentals, but that still means you have a landlord, just that your landlord is your neighbors.
Having the city or the state as your landlord seems like it would be more ideal, or at least a balance of coops and public housing.
For the U.S. at least:
With condos, there’s a condo association that owns all the common areas. Then the association itself is owned by the owners of the units, and the management is elected by the owners.
With co-ops, the unit owners directly own the common areas in common, and the management is also elected by the owners.
Functionally speaking they’re very similar, and co-ops tend to exist in places where this legal structure predates the invention of homeowner associations (basically New York).
HOAs exist to maintain home resale value, and little else. They protect the “investment” of owning land and the homes on them. The laws around the practice are draconian and overreaching.
But theres no reason a superificially similar institution couldn’t be built for equitable reasons and then only be given reasonable amounts of power.
Good luck with that…we’ve tried it since the beginning of time…those institutions invariably turn into HOA like cluster fucks of bad management.
I looked up the rest because it piqued my interest. Black Cat City by Jay Kinney, published in 1980.
Wtf… There’s no narrative or throughline, it’s just like… if you distilled “unsettling” and put it on paper.
Well, successful art I guess, it made me feel things…
“Drinnen saßen stehend Leute, schweigend ins Gespräch vertieft”
There’s a whole bunch of such surrealist art, and while me being a rather lazy student for most things art history means I have no idea whether there’s a better name for it, or how connected the artists behind them are, I still tend to find them rather fascinating.
Also, I’m not saying that surrealist art must necessarily miss a narrative throughline, though it’s true here.
“First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”
I love Victoria 3 because it appeals to the male fantasty, making the rich pay taxes.
For clarity, my understanding is that landlords in the game basically live rent free. Some of the buildings spawn with low numbers of apartments, so if you had a building with two apartments, 1 would be a landlord and the other tenet would pay x2 the rent.
So effectively they’re changing from having local landlords to instead paying rent to a distant landlord.
