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As opposed to all the regular kinds of shitty behaviour landlords inflict on their tenants already? I feel like "because the money people will continue to misbehave" is absolutely not a reason to avoid doing something.


UBI is unique. When I get a raise at work, my landlord doesn’t know. If you implement UBI, every landlord knows that every tenant in the whole country has $xxxx more per month to pay.

Literally 100% of them will raise the rent and there won’t be anything anyone can do about it.


I don't think it is this simple. Even with UBI, there will be varying quality of rentals, with nicer ones being more expensive. If every landlord jacked up the price, demand would shift to cheaper, lower quality rentals. More people will get roommates etc, reducing demand entirely.

In addition, every seller of a good/service could do the same. They can't all increase prices to extract the full $xxxx a month. There are much more complex dynamics at play then just "landlords will raise rent enough to extract the full UBI benefit."


This is only true in places where there are more people trying to rent than places.

In theory, having more capital available in the face of a landlord raising rent an obnoxious amount will incentivize people who aren't making much to move somewhere with a lower CoL that they might not have been able to make work otherwise because of uncertainty in the amount of time they'd be out of work or their base level of money available for that time.


This is only a problem when you have very limited housing supply, so you need to combine it with things like better housing/zoning policies and rent control.




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