As you know, you earn a certain amount of money each in-game day for each neighbourhood that The Saints control. A couple of weeks ago u/CommyGT released The Mean Streets which is a mod/romhack for Saints Row 1 that is designed to make the game more difficult. When I went to the forum thread and read through the changelog, something stood out to me.
-Until you [beat all of the gangs and become Julius' right-hand], you have no access to the Saint's funds. Your crib's safes will hold no money until then. You will struggle.
-Hoods now generate insane amounts of cash. Too bad you won't see it until the end.
Obviously this makes the game harder since you won't have any consistent income until the end of the game. You'll have to earn money completely on your own. At the same time, Commy raises a good point. The 'city income' in SR2 onwards makes sense because you are the boss but in SR1 until the epilogue, you're a high-level street thug at best. There isn't any apparent lore reason why you earn 'tribute' from controlled neighbourhoods. Its understandable from a pure gameplay standpoint and most people won't say no to free money but there still isn't any real explanation. I'm not referring to where the money itself comes from, but why the Playa is somehow entitled to it.
I don't know how organized The Saints are in terms of hierarchy (They're a street gang, not the Mafia) but its entirely possible that the Playa actually does rise through the ranks and is put in charge of their own crew as The Saints grow larger but again, this isn't shown or explained in-game, unless you count having more 'homie' slots but that's more of a gameplay feature than anything else.
To be honest, I don't think the devs thought about this too much, nor they expect Commy or myself to think about it either. Even then, the hood income is easy to ignore. You can just not collect it. I just wanted to post this and see what everybody else's thoughts are.