“Say, Geillsten? What’s your class?”

“[Tax Collector], Miss Solstice.”

Well, you can’t say she’s not a proper part of Liscor now.

They probably could build upward, but the city isn’t going to pay for existing buildings to be upgraded when those buildings aren’t owned by the city. That would just be giving free money to a few landowners, while other residents get nothing, and the city itself only gets a marginal increase in taxes from those landowners. Liscor’s walls probably aren’t high enough to do completely separate floors of the city itself in the way Pallass does.

Plus, going by some of the numbers we’ve seen throughout the story by this point, the rental situation seems to mostly be just due to greed. There have been mentions of increases in price of 100-200% in only a couple years, which is frankly insane. And Liscor is likely not seeing anywhere close to the same increase in funding from the landowners.

I believe the difference is that retroactively charging merchants for things like shield spider parts would completely bankrupt smaller merchants, and would just make the rest never want to trade with Liscor ever again. 2,500 shield spiders per year, at 2 silver extra each, would be 250 gold per year, not including any extra money on silk or whatever. Depending on how many years back they wanted to go for, that’s a lot of money to spring on probably a relative few merchants.

For Erin, on the other hand, while doing a retroactive tax would still be against the law, it’s probably not going to be an amount she couldn’t pay – especially after the last week or so of massively inflated prices selling to Pallass. Still unfair, and she might win if she tried to fight it, but if she doesn’t, that’s probably a few hundred gold easily for the city.

Not saying it’s the right thing to do, but I can see the difference in why they wouldn’t make as much of a fuss over charging Erin compared to the merchants.

the other problem is that it disincentivizes improvements and basic maintenance of existing properties and more room can always be made to build more housing if there is an incentive to do so. Also socialized housing has even more incentive problems than rent controls. Think of Project Housing, or read about how the soviets forced many families to share apartments in the name of efficiency.

agree ? but I don’t think you could runfortunately direct democracy to govern in accordance with sound economic theory.

“[Cobblers] have a guild?”

–> This is really niche but my spouse makes shoes so…. the term for a shoemaker was/is actually [Cordwain] or even [Shoemaker]. Cobblers (esp. back before industrialization) do repairs only, although even today cobblers are trained in repair and maintenance. https://theoldtimey.com/cordwainer-vs-cobbler-vs-shoemaker-whats-the-difference/