18 ms·

Rent in Cities Skylines 2 was too high, so the devs removed landlords

121 points by sam_bristow 2y ago

ajsnigrutin 2y ago
> It was getting so bad, people were actually suggesting building more homes. This sounds like some where suprised by that... of course we need more housing, if there are more houses than people who need the, the landlords will have to fight to keep renters in, to at last get some of the money. Somehow, back in communist times over here, we managed to build a lot... both the government, that built large apartment buildings, and also people themselves, that were allowed to build single family houses a lot easier than now, and they did that mostly by themselves and with help from friends. Housing wasn't an issue. And now, we act as if we're incapable of building anything anymore... no new neighbourhoods, no new schools, no new infrastructure projects... no nothing.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  We are incapable of doing so because doing so would lower property value. It's just that, nothing more than it.
  - ajsnigrutin 2y ago
    But sooner or later, housing prices will be the only thing voters are still interested in. (hopefully...)
legitster 2y ago
The actual blog post is not so polemic: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/4145079671516384052 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/41450796... "That means that 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." It sounds like the "virtual landlord" was mostly about allocating maintenance costs, and the actual fixes are a) hide the notifications more often b) make citizens spend less on food and c) let buildings deteriorate more rapidly. Not sure if I would want any strong takeaways from this.
- DangitBobby 2y ago
  That was also in TFA for what it's worth.
Animats 2y ago
Second Life has this problem in a big way. There are major landlords keeping properties in good areas off the market or setting very high prices on them to drive rents up. It's working, too. Any good property that comes up for sale at a low price is snapped up by a big landlord and the price raised. Cheap land is available, but it's going to be on a rocky plateau or behind a truck stop or something.
- yareally 2y ago
  A truck stop feels pretty benign for a neighbor in Second Life
- BirdieNZ 2y ago
  The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-and-the-digital-housing-crisis https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a... It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/ https://gameofrent.com/
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
    Sorry, what’s the fix? Undeveloped land tax?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - HDThoreaun 2y ago
      Land value tax, property tax which excludes the building. Forces speculators to pay society equal to the value theyre wasting
    - meibo 2y ago
      FFXIV just added a lottery and zoning rules, which IMO are the most boring ways to fix it. Arguably it came with the expected trade-offs zoning laws have in real-life, in that zones intended for their equivalent of guilds are often empty/dead now since there are not that many active guilds, and "legacy" wards that still have personal housing and guild housing intertwined are a lot more active and diverse.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. On top of that, communism was overpowered to the point where the middle class (and sometimes lower class) in communist countries were materially better-off than the upper class in non-communist countries (https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/ https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/). God I love Paradox Interactive. They aren't even trying to radicalize gamers against rent-seeking capitalism. They're just putting out games with complex simulations under the hood and inadvertently discovering that landlords ruin the game.
- recursive 2y ago
  Speaking from the perspective of a long-time renter, and current home owner. (well, the bank actually) Maybe I'm hopelessly corrupted by the system, but I'd like to try to understand. Let's say you wanted to live somewhere for like a year. If there were no landlords, how could you do that? Buy a house? I mean, I wouldn't have been able to afford that when I was in college. And I had different roommates each year. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Just the closing costs and agent fees can be $10k. Maybe houses would be cheaper, and the whole realtor/title thing can be reformed too. Maybe you could flip your house ownership more like a used car. But if that's the case, where are these houses coming from? Who would build them and why? Or maybe it would be all government housing projects? Landlords get a lot of hate. I've had a bunch of them, and most of them have been fine, basically. But like, honest question, what's the alternative?
  - haileys 2y ago
    Lots of public housing of a decent standard. The problem is that people, unless they can afford to buy, are forced into renting from a private landlord and working to pay off someone else's mortgage. If you have enough livable public housing such that anybody who needs a place to live can get a place on the public system, the power balance changes and private landlords aren't so much of a problem.
    - 2y ago
Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
I played CS2 for about a month at release. It was pretty broken, but playable if you didn't mind the performance issues. But the "high rent" problem drove me bonkers. You can specifically zone low-rent housing. But it didn't matter. They would live in houses and complain of high rent rather than move into the affordable denser housing across the street. The real question, IMO, is why does all housing in CS2 seem to be rented?
- thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
  Same reason as in real life over time everyone will be a renter. We subsidize landlords and as a result they have effectively unlimited capital to throw at additional properties meaning the price perpetually goes up and they have more assets to loan against to buy more properties. Then we allow them to take a depreciation value off their taxes on a asset that is appreciating in value. It's truly insane.
  - hn_version_0023 2y ago
    Hear, hear!
  - unstatusthequo 2y ago
    As a “land pauper,” I disagree. I have renters in Seattle and lose $1k a month because HOA and property taxes. I get zero tax breaks on the loss. Nothing. I’d kick them out and sell, but apparently Seattle is still recovering from COVID. Who knows. It was a bad investment and I learned a lot. That education was expensive. Not all landlords do well.
    - thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
      Then sell? I don't cry about the money I lost investing in startups I just keep investing. Why are you crying about the money you are losing like you are supposed to be absolutely guaranteed to make money? The reason you aren't selling is because you are lying or you believe the government should bail you out of your bad decisions.
Tiktaalik 2y ago
Here's the equation: Rent = (LandValue + (ZoneType * Building Level)) * LotSize * SpaceMultiplier Basically rent never goes down unless land value decreases. IRL Land Value basically always goes up (barring external events...) but you can help stagnate rents to at or below inflation by subdividing the land value. So the question is like is there a mechanism in the game for that? Doesn't look like it here in this equation (ie. no divisor) but maybe LandValue is modified elsewhere and at the Rent per Person equation the LandValue has already been divided by some amount. (edit: unless lotsize is the mechanism by which they're creating subdivision/apartments? ) This seems like a weird equation in that land value doesn't have a close relationship to zone type? That seems unaligned with reality, but maybe zoning impacts land value elsewhere via another equation.
- larsiusprime 2y ago
  What I'm curious about is how they derive land value in the first place. Do they have an actual supply and demand model driving it?
  - amenhotep 2y ago
    In games like this it tends to be based on a somewhat simplistic model of proximity to services. Being well served by schools, hospitals, bus stops, train stations, emergency services, electricity, plumbing, etc, drives the value of a tile up. Road noise, pollution, crime, disease, garbage, buildings that have been crushed by Godzilla, etc, drive the value of surrounding tiles down. Potentially there could be some sort of demand based model implemented on top of this? But the simulation of demand is going to come down to this abstract "how much does the computer like this tile" value anyway - the citizens are not actual people with actual preferences - so I'm not sure how much it would add.
    - Tiktaalik 2y ago
      All this makes sense and this is how I would do it. However there needs to be something whereby if the player adds more new properties of equal land value, then this depresses and moderates the land value of existing properties. Scarcity of high value properties should increase their own land value. Supplying more of them should lower their land value. If they don't have that sort of system then rent can only ever increase and the simulation is flawed.
more_corn 2y ago
So… eat the rich?

121 points by sam_bristow 2y ago

> It was getting so bad, people were actually suggesting building more homes. This sounds like some where suprised by that... of course we need more housing, if there are more houses than people who need the, the landlords will have to fight to keep renters in, to at last get some of the money. Somehow, back in communist times over here, we managed to build a lot... both the government, that built large apartment buildings, and also people themselves, that were allowed to build single family houses a lot easier than now, and they did that mostly by themselves and with help from friends. Housing wasn't an issue. And now, we act as if we're incapable of building anything anymore... no new neighbourhoods, no new schools, no new infrastructure projects... no nothing.

Iulioh 2y ago
We are incapable of doing so because doing so would lower property value. It's just that, nothing more than it.
- ajsnigrutin 2y ago
  But sooner or later, housing prices will be the only thing voters are still interested in. (hopefully...)

legitster 2y ago

The actual blog post is not so polemic: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/4145079671516384052 https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/949230/view/41450796... "That means that 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." It sounds like the "virtual landlord" was mostly about allocating maintenance costs, and the actual fixes are a) hide the notifications more often b) make citizens spend less on food and c) let buildings deteriorate more rapidly. Not sure if I would want any strong takeaways from this.

DangitBobby 2y ago
That was also in TFA for what it's worth.

Animats 2y ago

Second Life has this problem in a big way. There are major landlords keeping properties in good areas off the market or setting very high prices on them to drive rents up. It's working, too. Any good property that comes up for sale at a low price is snapped up by a big landlord and the price raised. Cheap land is available, but it's going to be on a rocky plateau or behind a truck stop or something.

yareally 2y ago
A truck stop feels pretty benign for a neighbor in Second Life
BirdieNZ 2y ago
The same problem exists in other games, like Ultima Online and FFXIV. There's a solution for this, which was used in EVE Online: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-and-the-digital-housing-crisis https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/digital-real-estate-a... It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/ https://gameofrent.com/
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  Sorry, what’s the fix? Undeveloped land tax?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    Land value tax, property tax which excludes the building. Forces speculators to pay society equal to the value theyre wasting
  - meibo 2y ago
    FFXIV just added a lottery and zoning rules, which IMO are the most boring ways to fix it. Arguably it came with the expected trade-offs zoning laws have in real-life, in that zones intended for their equivalent of guilds are often empty/dead now since there are not that many active guilds, and "legacy" wards that still have personal housing and guild housing intertwined are a lot more active and diverse.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

Reminds me of an issue with another Paradox Interactive title, Victoria 3. They had to rework it because, basically, the upper-classes stood in the way of all the good laws and reforms. On top of that, communism was overpowered to the point where the middle class (and sometimes lower class) in communist countries were materially better-off than the upper class in non-communist countries (https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/ https://www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-communism-op/). God I love Paradox Interactive. They aren't even trying to radicalize gamers against rent-seeking capitalism. They're just putting out games with complex simulations under the hood and inadvertently discovering that landlords ruin the game.

recursive 2y ago
Speaking from the perspective of a long-time renter, and current home owner. (well, the bank actually) Maybe I'm hopelessly corrupted by the system, but I'd like to try to understand. Let's say you wanted to live somewhere for like a year. If there were no landlords, how could you do that? Buy a house? I mean, I wouldn't have been able to afford that when I was in college. And I had different roommates each year. The paperwork would have been a nightmare. Just the closing costs and agent fees can be $10k. Maybe houses would be cheaper, and the whole realtor/title thing can be reformed too. Maybe you could flip your house ownership more like a used car. But if that's the case, where are these houses coming from? Who would build them and why? Or maybe it would be all government housing projects? Landlords get a lot of hate. I've had a bunch of them, and most of them have been fine, basically. But like, honest question, what's the alternative?
- haileys 2y ago
  Lots of public housing of a decent standard. The problem is that people, unless they can afford to buy, are forced into renting from a private landlord and working to pay off someone else's mortgage. If you have enough livable public housing such that anybody who needs a place to live can get a place on the public system, the power balance changes and private landlords aren't so much of a problem.
  - 2y ago

Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

I played CS2 for about a month at release. It was pretty broken, but playable if you didn't mind the performance issues. But the "high rent" problem drove me bonkers. You can specifically zone low-rent housing. But it didn't matter. They would live in houses and complain of high rent rather than move into the affordable denser housing across the street. The real question, IMO, is why does all housing in CS2 seem to be rented?

thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
Same reason as in real life over time everyone will be a renter. We subsidize landlords and as a result they have effectively unlimited capital to throw at additional properties meaning the price perpetually goes up and they have more assets to loan against to buy more properties. Then we allow them to take a depreciation value off their taxes on a asset that is appreciating in value. It's truly insane.
- hn_version_0023 2y ago
  Hear, hear!
- unstatusthequo 2y ago
  As a “land pauper,” I disagree. I have renters in Seattle and lose $1k a month because HOA and property taxes. I get zero tax breaks on the loss. Nothing. I’d kick them out and sell, but apparently Seattle is still recovering from COVID. Who knows. It was a bad investment and I learned a lot. That education was expensive. Not all landlords do well.
  - thisgoesnowhere 2y ago
    Then sell? I don't cry about the money I lost investing in startups I just keep investing. Why are you crying about the money you are losing like you are supposed to be absolutely guaranteed to make money? The reason you aren't selling is because you are lying or you believe the government should bail you out of your bad decisions.

Tiktaalik 2y ago

Here's the equation: Rent = (LandValue + (ZoneType * Building Level)) * LotSize * SpaceMultiplier Basically rent never goes down unless land value decreases. IRL Land Value basically always goes up (barring external events...) but you can help stagnate rents to at or below inflation by subdividing the land value. So the question is like is there a mechanism in the game for that? Doesn't look like it here in this equation (ie. no divisor) but maybe LandValue is modified elsewhere and at the Rent per Person equation the LandValue has already been divided by some amount. (edit: unless lotsize is the mechanism by which they're creating subdivision/apartments? ) This seems like a weird equation in that land value doesn't have a close relationship to zone type? That seems unaligned with reality, but maybe zoning impacts land value elsewhere via another equation.

larsiusprime 2y ago
What I'm curious about is how they derive land value in the first place. Do they have an actual supply and demand model driving it?
- amenhotep 2y ago
  In games like this it tends to be based on a somewhat simplistic model of proximity to services. Being well served by schools, hospitals, bus stops, train stations, emergency services, electricity, plumbing, etc, drives the value of a tile up. Road noise, pollution, crime, disease, garbage, buildings that have been crushed by Godzilla, etc, drive the value of surrounding tiles down. Potentially there could be some sort of demand based model implemented on top of this? But the simulation of demand is going to come down to this abstract "how much does the computer like this tile" value anyway - the citizens are not actual people with actual preferences - so I'm not sure how much it would add.
  - Tiktaalik 2y ago
    All this makes sense and this is how I would do it. However there needs to be something whereby if the player adds more new properties of equal land value, then this depresses and moderates the land value of existing properties. Scarcity of high value properties should increase their own land value. Supplying more of them should lower their land value. If they don't have that sort of system then rent can only ever increase and the simulation is flawed.

more_corn 2y ago

So… eat the rich?