Homeless Rampage The SecondLife Landscape. Lindens to Build Slums?

Yeah, the title is really bad. I wrote it when reading the first line of 'Second Life Land-Grab Snag':

As Second Life's user count continues to blossom, Linden Lab is running into problems with the creation of virtual homes...

Just today in SecondLife, I didn't witness people protesting at the Governor mansion. I didn't see any high rises going up either. I did encounter one lost soul at an ATM who quite simply asked me, "What are you doing here?". Perhaps he was waiting to mug me, dressed as a complete newbie. Maybe he had a copybot and wanted to copy my avatar. Maybe I should lock myself in my house and put little incompetent copybot deterrents around and not worry about this stuff, reveling in the '!quit' text spam, bathing in it, soaking it in through my avatar's textured pores.

Heaven forbid he just be a lost newbie. I handed him a landmark to the Shelter where he could mug other homeless people. But wait. He wasn't going to mug me. It must mean that homeless people in SecondLife are not criminals. Maybe they just don't need homes, those 117 prims to call home. Maybe he chose to wear a white t-shirt. I wear white t-shirts and blue jeans all the time in real life. Does that mean I'm a newbie in real life? I digress.

Perhaps the notorious [t:copybot] couldn't copy land despite all the strange claims that it could copy more than avatar attachments and textures (and even then, imperfectly for scripted attachments). Still - I see land for sale on the grid. It's not about land, it's about having your own island - 65,536 square meters of space, neatly divided into 128 areas of 512m a piece that will be rented out for at least $2.50 US a month.

Let's see. $2.50 per 512m, 128 lots, that's... $320. Given renting the island from Linden Labs at $200 instead (with the 'cry me a river' reactions to the price increases), it means that land barons will be paying off their initial investment and making a profit within 6 months. A profit of... $120 a month at that point, if they rent all of the island. It still means that it could be cheaper to rent land than to buy it and pay land tier, as long as it's below $6 a month for 512m - or, let's say at 300L/1US (about 270 is what it is now) - 1800 Lindens (1620 Lindens) a month. Of course, there's a lot of risk involved - and there's also a lot of capital required to start the ball rolling. It's a valid business, one which deserves some respect - but it also shows that SecondLife isn't as balanced as people with the upper hand want everyone to think. If you don't have about $2k in the bank to play the island rental game, you're doomed to rent.

Color me bemused.

Oh yeah. There's a huge land problem, but it's not about the homeless. It's about people trying to develop areas to rent out or to simply have their own island. If people wanted land, there's plenty - it's just not as cost effective.

The land mass may well increase by 30% in the coming month - but the question will be how much of it will be there in 6 months. In a way, it could be just more subsidization of the larger land barons holdings.

If anyone needs shelter in the interim, please search for the Shelter. I wouldn't want anyone catching a cold while the large businesses within SecondLife get larger while whining about real world corporations coming in. I wouldn't want you to turn to a life of crime; reverse engineering SecondLife and doing other naughty things because you don't have a place to stay when it rains, or worse: having no place for your avatar to poop.