Cities: Skylines II Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

For months, players have been complaining about the high rents in the city-building sim. This week, developer Colossal Order fixed the problem by doing something real cities can’t: removing landlords.

The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

“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.”

The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

Call yourself whatever you want, at the end of the day we’re all utopianists who’re overly self-assured that our favorite pet-theory-system will eventually remove all suffering.

“If my vision for society were adopted, the world would be perfect!”

Keep dreaming. We’re fucked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKGb8KFY5F8

There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/

ETA:

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^{https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf}

We’ll have to agree to disagree. I prefer nuance to oversimplification.

Did anyone actually read the whole article? These comments sorta read like the answer is no.

The researchers say that their findings prove no active collaboration between TikTok and far-right parties like the AfD but that the platform’s structure gives bad actors an opportunity to flourish. “TikTok’s built-in features such as the ‘Others Searched For’ suggestions provides a poorly moderated space where the far-right, especially the AfD, is able to take advantage,” Miazia Schüler, a researcher with AI Forensics, tells WIRED.

A better headline might have been “TikTok algorithm gamed by far-right AfD party in Germany”, but I doubt that would drive as many clicks.

For more info, check out this article: Germany’s AfD on TikTok: The political battle for the youth

They should call TechMoan or CathodeRayDude! One of them probably has the right player just sort of… lying around!

Thank you for mentioning FairEmail, and thank you @wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world, for elaborating on what makes it great.

Thanks to your recommendations I installed it last night and paid the $6 one-time license fee to unlock the advanced features. Being able to set custom notification sounds per sender is a feature I’ve been wanting on my phone for years. I finally have it now and it’s already changing my life for the better.

This is some top tier mental gymnastics. Holy shit, I hope you’re a troll. You’re literally on the internet discussing your plans to commit fraud. Mensa-level shit, here.

People are going to buy CP one way or another… that means you should make it and sell it to them, right?

Grow the fuck up, and maybe train a LLM on ethics, you’re going to need some education on the subject if you hope to stay out of prison.

Say what you will, but this person absolutely knows what they’re about.

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^{https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf}

Nothing at all?

We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).

^{https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf}

👍 Good luck out there!

I don’t have a position on cell phone interfaces and hadn’t planed to give one. No skin in this game, really, though it’s clearly a contentious issue!

I just can’t help but notice when people are being terrible conversation partners, mostly. Me finding you to be an asshole has nothing to do with how I feel about cell phone ports.

Anyone fucking stupid enough to think the 3.5mm Jack is a good thing deserves the disappointment they feel every time a device doesn’t have own, tbh, bring it on themselves

Are you 12?

I love how anyone with half a fucking brain poor conversational skills and an inability to see things from someone else’s perspective gets down voted.

Try talking to people online as though they were in the same room as you, IRL. If you’re already doing that, I have to ask, how many offline friends do you have?

systematic

You caught me. I still daily drive Chrome. I am an on-again off-again Firefox user and have been for nearly 2 decades.

That said, I appreciate that input. I’ve been working on switching over to using Firefox as my daily driver, but it’s going to take some time for me to fully transition, unless you know of an extension or script that can migrate all my chrome tabs over to Firefox. I’m curious to see if it can handle my full browsing habits, now that they’ve evolved into what most would consider “tab hoarder” behavior.

Reposting a comment I wrote in another thread that explains it:

Bookmarks are for things I’ll need to reference again and again in the coming years. I do keep a tightly-curated bookmark collection, I just don’t want it clogged up with a bunch of stuff I can’t foresee needing in the long term.

Tabs are for things I’m working on right now and don’t need bookmarking for the long term. And, for what it’s worth, most of the browser windows are custom-titled, so the windows themselves are a lot like bookmark folders, while the tabs are like temporary bookmarks.

Plus, the ability to search through tabs by hitting Ctrl+Shift+A means that it ends up being faster to search through my tabs than my bookmarks, without using the mouse. ex: Ctrl+Shift+A, Type needed page, up/down arrows if needed, then hit enter to move to the tab. With Ctrl+Shift+O, you don’t get the same ease of scrolling the results without tabbing through a bunch of junk first.

There are other reasons, including neurological ones surely, but those are my primary justifications.

32gb. The browser is using about 11.2gb of ram at the moment, but I haven’t restarted the browser or the computer in about a week. After a browser restart it’s usually only using 5~6gb, though that steadily climbs as I reactivate hibernated tabs.

Reposting from a previous comment I’ve made about this topic:

Bookmarks are for things I’ll need to reference again and again in the coming years. I do keep a tightly-curated bookmark collection, I just don’t want it clogged up with a bunch of stuff I can’t foresee needing in the long term.

Tabs are for things I’m working on right now and don’t need bookmarking for the long term. And, for what it’s worth, most of the browser windows are custom-titled, so the windows themselves are a lot like bookmark folders, while the tabs are like temporary bookmarks.

Plus, the ability to search through tabs by hitting Ctrl+Shift+A means that it ends up being faster to search through my tabs than my bookmarks, without using the mouse. ex: Ctrl+Shift+A, Type needed page, up/down arrows if needed, then hit enter to move to the tab. With Ctrl+Shift+O, you don’t get the same ease of scrolling the results without tabbing through a bunch of junk first.

There are other reasons, including neurological ones surely, but those are my primary justifications.

How is that embarrassing? I have literally 639 tabs right now, across 39 windows. Just live your life as you see fit.