Social housing district policy

[Hiramas]

So as most of you guys, I have watched a lot of streams these past few days and one thing I saw was that things could get quite uniform in the mid to late game cities.
I am sure we get more ways to personalize our cities soon, but I had a little idea while commenting on another thread.

I want to propose a social housing district policy.
What this would do is encourage non educated, poor people to move into a region with high land value.
In addition it would restrict the education level to non educated and elementary school, no matter which schools are actually available.
This would create a poor looking district with "ugly" small houses or highrises, depending on your zoning.
This would enable us to keep a lower level workforce for otherwise high end cities without actually neglecting the people living there and give us more options to personalize our
city. Maybe you want to create low level neighborhoods next to highways or industrial zones, harbors, that get slowly better in other areas?
Or maybe you want to have the contrast between your flashy downtown and outlying worker districts?

I would like to hear your thoughts and suggestions on this idea.

 

[EvilTom]

Lower level housing and their workers are less fussy, so just give them less services in an area and keep them low? Would that not work?

 

[Inge Jones]

In addition it would restrict the education level to non educated and elementary school, no matter which schools are actually available.

This is appallingly discriminatory. It's true that a lot of factors hinder people on low incomes from reaching their full potential but to have a game actually program in an absolute educational ceiling is really sending out a dreadful message.

 

[EvilTom]

This is appallingly discriminatory. It's true that a lot of factors hinder people on low incomes from reaching their full potential but to have a game actually program in an absolute educational ceiling is really sending out a dreadful message.

I agree. This level of social engineering was perhaps not what the OP was suggesting, but you have to be very careful with things like this. You don't want to bring back a class system through enforcement.

 

[lasch]

In real life not everyone goes to highschool and college, maybe a third visit the former and less than a quarter the latter, meaning there are plenty of people to fill the millions of job slots wich need less education. The OP has the right idea to translate that fact into the game, but in our age of hypersensitivity and political correctness, Paradox probably can´t and won´t do that. So we must figure out another way to create a game mechanic wich solves that problem w/ooffending the usual suspects. SC 4 had service buildings with a changable influence radius, wich gave the player a certain amount of control over the type of residents (low, middle or high income). Cities Skylines doesn´t, so maybe someone has an idea how to solve that, because i don´t.

 

[Aemilius XXIII]

I like the idea of social housing, but living in a house built by the social sector of the economy doesn't always mean that social houses are poor and ugly. It depends in what kind of society you live. Is it a city (nation) strongly influenced by a laissez faire economy or a mild but for the city treasure much more expensive social democracy or maybe by extreme communism? One of the things I am missing in this kind of games are political idea's, having there influence how a city is ruled.

To bring these idea's into a city building game we need in the game two financial sectors, city owned property and private owned property, and a ground/property policy, including selling to and buying ground and property from the private sector.

In the beginning of the game, when nothing is built yet, all the ground is owned by the city. Roads (in the game) are always city property but zoning along the side of roads means in fact that the ground owner (thus being the city) made the decision to sell the relevant ground tiles to the private sector according the city development plan. Thus green zoned ground tiles to sims to built on their acquired ground their private owned houses, blue zone's to the private owned commercial sector and yellow zone's to the private industrial sector. The pro side for a city doing that is that it will receive property tax (based on the actual ground value and the set tax rate) from the private owners. This is almost conform the already existing system in the game. New in my idea is that the city receive a one time only selling income, based on the actual land value when it sells ground tiles to the private sector. The zoned ground tiles are definive sold to the private sector at the moment that the property building activity starts there. Before that you can reconsider your decision by dezoning still empy ground tiles without any costs. Zoned ground tiles were property is built on can not used any more by te city without (costly) consequenses due buying back the relevant ground tiles from the private owners for the actual!! ground and property value. The (realistic) fun having this suggestion in the game is that you as city mayor can't do what you want regarding the to the private sector sold parts of your city if the city don't have the money to buy the private owned ground tiles back. Rising land values of private owned ground tiles makes buying back private owned ground more expensive (very costly) and that can be a nice solution to fix the current existing unbalance in the game that it is i.m.o. too easy to make a lot of money for your city. Rising private owned ground values have a positive effect on the happiness of the relevant sims, but dropping values of private owned ground tiles have a negative effect on their happiness.

In my suggestion you can also built houses, commercial buildings and industries whitout zoning ground tiles. This is regarding housing the less or non educated (poor) sims in my suggestion social housing policy. In that case the city (you) build houses (and other real property) and maintain full control of what you are building on and remove from the city owned ground tiles. But now it is the city that must pay the price of building real property regarding what the actual costs are. And the city must pay a maintance fee and don't have tax income for its social houses. On the positive side, the city receive as real property owner each month rent money that is based on a set rent percentage being relative to the tax percentage private house owners must pay if they live on that location. Of course sims can't pay more rent for living in city owned houses than they can effort. Further there exist a income upper limit for the right to live in city owned social houses, this to prevent that richer sims can rent these houses. So regarding social housing the city can make the choice to save money by not building social houses or building cheap ugly and poor rent houses, or make the poor sims happy to let them live in nice good looking social houses for (much) lower rent income than real property market rent prices. But that has (some) negative consequenses for the happiness of richer sims, living in commercial rent houses or private house owners (being somewhat envious) not really liking that the city tax income they have paid is used to subsidize the housing comfort for the poorer sims.

 

[Leermeister]

Better would be to add homelessness to the game and possibility of public housing and low income apartments and homeless shelters to help them. As far as them looking run down they should be built to look decent like real life but they should also add graffiti and such as crime in an area increases. Homelessness and poor un-educated would generate crime so where they live would have an increase in graffiti and buildings looking run down. As far as reality i really do not know why the government would
restrict these people to low educations, the whole reasoning behind having low income housing and programs to help them would be to encourage them to improve their lives.

I Don't think they should put some unrealistic program that attracts poor people and purposefully keeps them poor to look poor in that district. They could achieve your poor looking area by putting in homeless shelters and low income housing similar to real life instead. And putting homeless in the game would add to depth anyway. You would then build public housing and try to encourage them to get educated , not have some ridiculous law that keeps them uneducated just to keep a problem going.

Fact is a simple graffiti mechanic linked to crime would achieve the looks, and as far as keeping an uneducated population around, just don't build schools in a certain area.

 

[Inge Jones]

In real life not everyone goes to highschool and college, maybe a third visit the former and less than a quarter the latter, meaning there are plenty of people to fill the millions of job slots wich need less education. The OP has the right idea to translate that fact into the game, but in our age of hypersensitivity and political correctness, Paradox probably can´t and won´t do that. So we must figure out another way to create a game mechanic wich solves that problem w/ooffending the usual suspects. SC 4 had service buildings with a changable influence radius, wich gave the player a certain amount of control over the type of residents (low, middle or high income). Cities Skylines doesn´t, so maybe someone has an idea how to solve that, because i don´t.

One way is to tie it into household income. A household with low income may mean the young person needs to get a paid job as soon as possible in order to contribute towards his keep. So the game can emulate this, with an extra option for the mayor of how much money will be made available for maintenance grants for students. A generous amount budgeted for this will mean that students will receive an income and can stay in education all the way through the system. None set aside would effectively mean "poor" kids would leave school at the earliest time.

 

[lasch]

The idea of Aemilius sounds really good, but i don´t think Paradox is going to make a huge change in game mechanics like that atm. A policy wich grants special education funding for low income households is most likely the best and easy way to to solve the problem right now. Even more easier to implement would be an arbitrary fixed number of people with low education per city, as someone in the main forum suggested. Or a new type of zoning for low income.