New Player Housing Act

[xXTheoryXx]

CONGRESS OF THE
COMMONWEALTH OF REDMONT
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A BILL TO
RE-ESTABLISH AND MODERNISE THE NEW PLAYER HOUSING REGISTRY
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The people of the Commonwealth of Redmont, through their elected Representatives in the Congress and the force of law ordained to that Congress by the people through the constitution, do hereby enact the following provisions into law:
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PART I — PRELIMINARIES

1. Short Title and Enactment

(1) This Act may be cited as the 'New Player Housing Act'.
(2) This Act shall be enacted immediately upon its assent.
(3) This Act has been authored by Speaker of the House xXTheoryXx.
(4) This Act has been co-sponsored by Senator TrueDarklander.
(5) This Act revives and replaces the rescinded New Player Apartments Act.

2. Reasons and Intent

(1) The rescinded New Player Apartments Act relied on a manually-maintained list requiring the Department of Education to shuffle listings and physically inspect plots, an administrative burden that proved unsustainable.
(2) Landlords had no positive incentive to list affordable units, leaving the registry thin and underused during the most critical period of a new player's experience.
(3) This Act re-establishes the registry on an automated footing, integrated with the existing apartments portal, and adds a modest incentive so that affordable new player housing is reliably available.

3. Definitions

(1) For the purposes of this Act, the following definitions shall apply:

(a) New Player. A player with less than 2 months of activity on the server.
(b) New Player Unit. A rental apartment or house reserved for New Players, with rent not exceeding $200 per 14 days.
(c) Portal. The Department of Education apartments listing service.

PART II — THE REGISTRY

4. Establishment and Administration

(1) The Department of Education (DOE) shall maintain a register of New Player Units, displayed on the Portal and the new player guide.
(2) A plot qualifies for listing where at least two units, or 33% of the plot's units (whichever is greater), are New Player Units.

5. Landlord Incentive

(1) A landlord whose New Player Unit is occupied by a verified New Player shall be eligible for a rent subsidy of $100 per occupied unit per 14 days, paid from the DOE's monthly appropriation.
(2) The DOE may cap total subsidies to remain within its appropriated budget and shall publish the subsidy rate in advance.

6. Integrity

(1) Listing a plot that does not meet Section 4(2) constitutes Fraud.
(2) A plot found non-compliant shall be de-listed; an owner de-listed more than twice shall be ineligible to list for 30 days.

 

[Franciscus]

Veto

This bill would create, by statute, a particular housing registry for new players. I like the idea, but I think this should be left to department policy or executive order rather than statute, just as the general Apartment Registry is governed by EO 39/25 rather than by statute.

The congress, when urging the creation of the general apartment registry, had the foresight to pass a non-binding resolution instead of a bill. This allowed for the Congress to formally communicate its wishes without binding us to a particular implementation framework. I am particularly concerned with putting this in statute because we rely on external service providers to host infrastructure, meaning that we rely on certain players to continue playing and acting in good faith. Making this a statutory requirement would give external hosts substantial bargaining power over hosting price and also would open up the Commonwealth up to claims of failure to perform statutory duty arising from a third-party's choice to walk away from DC. Because people just kinda hard quit from time-to-time, this is a real risk worth considering.

Because all this bill achieves can be done through department policy or EO under existing law, and because this statute would create an external reliance upon third parties in statute, I think it more prudent to veto this as a bill and take efforts to revise the apartment registry executive order (or other DoE policy) to include new players housing listings and provide services around that.