So I was thinking about the recent proposal in Seattle for rent control. And while looking into how this might effect the cost of rent in this fair city I ran across an article that detailed how Seattle's rent increased by 6,5% last year. And how cities like San Francisco, which has rent control, increased by 13.5%. An added consequence of the rent control is a linkage fee. This is a $22 per square foot cost to developers that is used to build affordable housing. In the end new rental buildings will have to absorb that linkage fee which in turn drives up rent.
This then led me to thinking about how I might create a game economy based on Monopoly but with a rent control/linkage mechanism.
Then it hit me. In monopoly as I build more houses and eventually hotels the cost I have to pay when I stop on the property "rent" increases with the number of houses. Since when does an increase supply but no increase in demand ever resulted in higher cost to the consumer? It seems to me that in fact if there were more houses or hotels I would need to drive the price down in order to get people to stay at my establishment over another.
Players of Monopoly are essentially forced into paying to stay at a property just because they happened to stop there.
Can you imagine Monopoly with linkage? You could build houses but if you wished to "upgrade"to a hotel then you would need to pay a linkage fee that would go to the player who has the least houses so that they can in turn create more houses.
Can anyone think of a game where players can choose to stay somewhere and the price actually follows the real world economy and goes down when supply goes up and demand goes down or remains unchanged?
Or can you think of a game that uses a tax or linkage fee as a catch-up mechanism so that the leaders pay to keep the players that have fallen behind in the game?
Thoughts?
