The Warehouse District is up for redevelopment, and a developer wants fifty luxury condos — $5 million in new tax revenue, or a wrecked neighborhood. Seven groups want seven different things, and in four days the council votes. Students take a role, build a case, and argue it at a public hearing. Then the class projects the Boomtown Sandbox, enters the ordinances the council actually passed, and watches every group's meters move at once.
One learning target per day, each ending in an exit ticket. Day 1's research becomes evidence in the Day 4 speech.
Read the stakeholder sheet, set all three meters to 5, pull one real number about your own town, and circle the meter you won't compromise on.
I can apply push and pull factors to explain why people move into or out of a changing community.Write an in-character social media post — one feeling, one concrete image, one number — and design the visual. Posts go up in a class slideshow.
I can identify how neighborhood change creates winners and losers among different groups in the same place.Pick one ordinance, build a five-minute speech, then test it alone in the sandbox and find out who it hurts.
I can analyze how a proposed policy affects growth, displacement, and stability across competing groups.The council hears every group and votes on the record. Then the class runs that vote through the sandbox and sees the consequences, live.
I can evaluate and defend a policy proposal that balances economic, social, and spatial trade-offs.Free, printable, no account. Print one stakeholder sheet per student by role — that sheet is their home base all four days.
| Resource | Used on | Download | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Four-Day Teacher Lesson Plan Timings, teacher moves, the reveal protocol, the sandbox answer key, and the real-numbers lookup table. Five pages. |
Planning | 1 for you | Download PDF |
| Stakeholder Sheets Seven roles: your three meters, your key numbers, how each ordinance moves you, and a scorecard to shade in. |
Days 1–4 | 1 per student, by role | Download PDF |
| POV Sheets Word bank, phrases, image prompts, and caption starters for the in-character social media post. |
Day 2 | 1 per student, by role | Download PDF |
| Council Speech Sheets The five-minute speech scaffold. The City Official gets a chair-and-vote sheet instead. |
Days 3–4 | 1 per student, by role | Download PDF |
| Capstone Reflection Four written prompts and a 20-point rubric. Running Boomtown standalone? Assign prompts 02 and 04 only. |
After Day 4 | 1 per student | Download PDF |
| Student Slide Deck Eight slides: the scenario, the seven roles, and a daily agenda for each of the four days. |
Days 1–4 | Project | Download PPTX |
Prefer to print from the browser? The lesson plan is also a print-ready web page.
Every meter starts at 5. A group wins when all three reach 6; a meter at 2 or below is a crisis. The treasury starts at $500K and can't go below zero, so the order the council passes things in matters. Four results are worth knowing before you teach it.
The condos alone bring the richest treasury in the game — $900K — and nobody wins. Four groups fall into crisis, the Developer included.
Affordable housing, preservation, height limits, and green infrastructure together run the treasury to −$275K and the sandbox refuses the last ordinance. No revenue, no protection to hand out.
The community coalition without the condos gets five groups winning and nobody in crisis — and the council still reads NO DEAL, because Developer Build Speed sits at 3.
The only way everyone wins: approve the project and attach every condition to it. The condo revenue is what pays for the affordability. Four combinations reach it.
Boomtown is invented; the pressures are not. Page 5 of the lesson plan is a lookup table that swaps every placeholder figure for a real, sourced one about your students' own town — census rent, HUD fair market rent, your city's budget. If you do one row, do the Renter.
"1 in 3 seniors get displaced" is scenario flavor, not a sourceable statistic — and the real research is more interesting. Researchers disagree about how much gentrification directly pushes people out; what changes reliably is who can move in. The plan gives you the citations and the line to say instead.
Each stakeholder sheet shows how six ordinances move that role; the sandbox models all eight. Say so before the reveal, so a mismatch reads as "the model knows more," not "I did it wrong."