How much rent?

[Huyderman]

Chapter six of Low Tech Companion 3 have rules and guidelines for creating buildings and structures, but there is a notable omission; the cost of land.

Unless you're in unclaimed frontier, someone is bound to claim ownership over the land you want to build something on, which means unless you've been gifted with land you'd have to either purchase it or more likely rent the land from it's owner.

I know this is a complex issue, varying widely from period to period, and locality to locality, but there must be able to ascertain some gameable assumptions?

[Xplo]

Eh. Well...

Presumably the land's value in a capitalist economy is related to how much money you can make from it. So, given a piece of land, determine the number of people who are likely to work it and their total monthly income (including business owners, not just labor), then multiply that figure by something large (I'd guess at least 120) to get the base market value. Divide by somewhat more than that to get a rental value (because if renting cost as much as owning, people would buy instead).

Since tying value to income already accounts for things like good or bad location, infrastructure, etc. I wouldn't worry about this so much - doctors and lawyers don't work in slums, even if they physically could, so slum land is going to be worth less, etc. - but you could still modify the cost of a piece of land if you think it's particularly desirable or undesirable.

[Anthony]

Figure that rent will be about 1/3 of typical income, and thus it varies by location and TL, though higher TL usually has a lower population density (yes, this will make rent higher than cost of living at high tech. Deal with it, the cost of living rules are garbage).

[The Colonel]

For quite a bit of low tech you're liable to be paying your rent by labour one way or the other ... if it helps I seem to recall that a serf owed his landlord around three days a week plus sundry other duties, whereas IIRC knight service was 40 days per year.