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If UBI is so high that people can afford paying extra without working for it then maybe, but I don't think that is the idea behind UBI. There still needs to be
by alpaca128 7mo ago
If UBI is so high that people can afford paying extra without working for it then maybe, but I don't think that is the idea behind UBI. There still needs to be an incentive for people to work, they should just be in a place where they actually have a choice instead of living in survival mode every day.
- estearum 7mo agoDoesn't matter at all how much it is. It'll be (almost entirely or entirely) eaten by landlords. I am a landlord. I am setting prices for renewal. I have come to learn that 100% of my possible customer base now has $200/mo more to spend. I raise prices $200/mo with absolute certainty that I will find a renter. Congrats, mission accomplished.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoHow do you control what other landlords do? Why won't any undercut you by $200 and get your tenants?
- kbelder 7mo agoIn a normal market, they would. But housing is highly regulated with artificial shortages, so that pricing is very distorted.
- estearum 7mo agoRegulation is not what suppresses production, but the actual profit margins. It's extremely hard to make money building housing because the cost of land and labor are so high. These costs are high because we now live in an advanced economy where land can do much more valuable things than "be housing", and laborers can do much more productive things than "build housing."
- cogman10 7mo agoYup. Development companies contract when the housing market contracts. They aren't building houses for the fun of it, they are building them because they believe the 100 houses they build in a hot market will ultimately pay back the land purchase rights. They will never build so many houses as to decrease the cost of a home. I actually got my home from a developer right after the housing bubble. They confided in me that they were giving away these homes pretty much at cost and that they had to fire a huge portion of their staff because the market was just crap at the time. Really, the only way to actually achieve lower housing prices is through the state ownership and build out. The state could also spend a premium on building homes that it sells at a loss or rents at lower rates. But that will be pretty unpopular with the general public.
- estearum 7mo agoYep — or aggressive subsidization of the inputs of housing production, or some other cost management of an input (such as a high LVT that discourages speculation and withholding of valuable land from use)
- joe_the_user 7mo agoI disagree. Zoning, building permits, inflated utility hook-up charges, etc is what restricts me from buying a one-acre parcel and putting in 30 snug cabins.
- estearum 7mo agoSure, but if zoning etc didn't prevent you from doing that, the price of the land would just be far higher. High enough again to make it hardly profitable (if you're lucky) to do what you're allowed to do on that land. There are entire businesses that just buy lots, change their zoning, then sell them. It's all priced in.
- joe_the_user 7mo agoYou are confusing marginal price (or profit-equalization) theory with numerical limits on the level of housing unit production. If people were allowed to build as they wished, they'd build a lot of housing, much of the housing crisis would subside and then the profitability of building house would equalize with the profitability of other uses. But stable point would give a lot more people housing. It's like... Taxation or similar things can reduce X use of resource Y. Remove taxation and eventually X use isn't any more profitable than other uses but a tautology of markets/economics, not an argument the taxation isn't limit the production involved in X use.
- estimator7292 7mo agoBecause tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever. Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them. Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoEverything you've written here presupposes a housing shortage. Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they may ever actually accomplish this).
- estearum 7mo agoHousing will always fall short of demand. Nobody, progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an oversupply of housing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoThis just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus. The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.
- estearum 7mo ago> There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus. Yes, bad places at bad times. Can you name good ones?
- davyAdewoyin 7mo agoIt doesn't matter, because land is scarce resource
- gruez 7mo agoLand might be scarce in the technical sense, but not in the practical sense. Housing is only expensive because people want to live in superstar cities, which in turn is because that's where all the jobs are. If UBI eliminates the imperative to live in superstar cities, that makes scarcity a non-issue.
- estearum 7mo agoJust need UBI, unlike all other forms of marginal increases in income, to spur people to move away from cities rather than towards them.
- randerson 7mo agoI can work from anywhere, but I like to live in a superstar city because I find it boring living in the suburbs. I want to be near my friends, near the live events, near the buzzing restaurants and art galleries and clothing stores where I can walk around and touch things. There will always be a concentration of people in cities for these reasons.
- gruez 7mo ago>There will always be a concentration of people in cities for these reasons. That's fine. Not everyone has to move. As long as the marginal city dweller would rather have cheaper housing than "buzzing restaurants and art galleries", there will be downward pressure on housing prices.
- phil21 7mo agoAll this would do is raise prices in the marginally cheaper places to live, in order of desirability. Sure it might reduce some prices in the core "superstar" cities, but not by a whole lot - since by definition those receiving a net-benefit from UBI are going to make less than average. Especially for a HCoL city. Sure a few folks will drop out of the highly competitive professional job market to go homestead somewhere. They will be a rounding error, since they have already expressed revealed preference that "bare minimum lifestyle" is not enough. Someone capable of holding down a $350k/yr white collar job is already qualified to go make $70k/yr remotely in some random city anywhere in the US they want to live but they choose not to. As we've seen with COVID remote work, the desirable "cheap" places to live will very rapidly have price appreciation because they are starting from such a low floor to begin with. A $300/mo increase in some 30,000 population city in the midwest is a lot more material to the market than a $300/mo decrease for a $3k/mo apartment in a top 10 city core. It also ignores the folks who want to live in the superstar cities but cannot currently afford to. If UBI is high enough to really matter, there will simply be a reshuffling. I'd expect upper-end to perhaps go down (largely due to increased taxes and thus less disposable income for the high earning group), but the lower-end to be raised eating up basically all the UBI surplus. Also this totally ignores the third and fourth (and more!) order effects. If people are less incentivized to work, and work carries a much higher tax load (as it must for UBI to be worth even considering) - pay for high-end jobs must increase since working is going to have less net-benefit for an individual who now has a choice to totally drop out of the workforce and have others pay for everything. Who knows? Maybe prices actually increase in those superstar cities as they become even more winner-take-all environments?
- iso1631 7mo agoUnless of course that UBI is funded by a land value tax.
- SoftTalker 7mo agoHow does land value tax help in particular here? Landlord pays land value tax, which is distributed via UBI, and then paid back to the landlord in higher rents (in the above scenaro).
- larsiusprime 7mo agoThis is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents. https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/PPI-Will-LVT-raise-rent.pdf https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...
- SoftTalker 7mo agoThe argument seems to be "that landlords are already charging the maximum that tenants are willing to pay for access to a given location and so cannot arbitrarily raise rents when a LVT is imposed." But, if the tenants now have more money in the form of UBI, then that argument doesn't hold.
- estearum 7mo agoNo the argument is that the landlord will raise rents, but they will not keep them. The gain generated by UBI, by virtue of raising the value of the land underneath the unit, would be recouped by the LVT at tax time. UBI is passed from the tenants to the landlord in the form of higher prices, but is recouped by the LVT, which cannot be passed in reverse from the landlord back to the tenant.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
- chr1 7mo agoThat extra 200 will also allow some people to move to a rural area, decreasing demand, which means you won't find a renter.
- lenkite 7mo agoThis - since you can live in a rural area with UBI - and you get more time in the day to manage your accommodations, the move to urban housing is not so critical.
- estearum 7mo agoYes if you simply assert an upside down reality, this is a good solution. However, people actually move toward higher COL areas as their income permits them to. If more income meant people moved away from high COL areas, cities wouldn't exist. We'd have a flat distribution of people across approximately all land with ultra-low COL and ultra-low productivity everywhere.
- auggierose 7mo agoYou make a logical error here: UBI is independent from where you live. Normal income is not.
- estearum 7mo agoYou make a logical error here: you are supposing I'm referring to the case of someone moving to a place in order to earn more. I am not. I am referring to the case of when people earn more, they end up choosing to live in more expensive places. Both scenarios are true, but only one is the one I'm pointing to because it's economically identical to UBI.
- auggierose 7mo agoNo, I am not interested in the motivation at all, and it plays no role. That is the logical error you make. You are trying to make an argument based on current data, but that current data does not include the fact that income is correlated to location, but UBI is not. So your current data is not a proof of anything, really. In general I agree with your view though that UBI could be captured by landlords, and that landlords are a special case. So let's introduce special laws for that along with UBI. Problem solved. Alternatively though, if that turns out to be too complicated with too many side effects, I think there is a good chance that UBI leads to people being able to spread out more evenly, away from expensive and dense cities. You tried to make an argument why this will not happen, but as explained, your argument is not conclusive.
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoI am a progessive state government. I am considering legislation for the next fiscal year. I have come to learn that 100% of private landlords have increased their rents by the full amount of the UBI we introduced last year. I ban private rentals and/or private ownership of homes and/or introduce strict rent control policies (depending on precisely how progressive we're feeling this year). Congrats, mission accomplished.
- estearum 7mo agoYes! Excellent work. Now there is no incentive for anyone to build housing for our growing population!
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoIndeed, a critical problem. But wait ... what's that? You say there are places where the state builds housing? How could it be?
- estearum 7mo agoSure but now you're not just talking about UBI, are you? You're now talking about UBI, plus rent controls, plus state-built housing. All to make UBI actually do anything at all other than enrich existing landlords. Why don't we just skip the UBI and the rent controls and instead just have the state build housing?
- PaulDavisThe1st 7mo agoBecause UBI is largely orthogonal to those things. It's a way of taking productivity gains and ensuring that the entire population benefits from them.
- estearum 7mo agoBut... without those other changes... UBI doesn't benefit the entire population, as we've just established. It benefits landlords.
- zozbot234 7mo ago> I am a landlord. > I am setting prices for renewal. Landlords do not really set prices arbitrarily, especially not in HCOL areas where most of the cost is land rent. The rent is set by the market, and if there's a new UBI only a negligible fraction of it will go towards rent. Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics) and creates future opportunities for job creation in these economically depressed areas where such opportunities are most clearly needed.
- estearum 7mo agoYou’re making an argument for my point of view. Rents are set by local wages (via mechanism of land rents) > Rents might even decrease since any given UBI amount will go a lot further in a lower-COL area, which incents people to move out (reversing gentrification dynamics) Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim? History shows — across the board — people move toward higher COL areas as their ability to pay for COL grows. Why would this be different?
- zozbot234 7mo ago> Can you identify any historical analogy to this claim? It's difficult because the main driver is clearly towards increased urbanization, driven by the high productivity of urban jobs. But if you're planning to live mostly on your UBI and work less if at all, you won't care as much about that. There were several "back to the land" movements in the history of modern developed countries, and the early stages of succesful gentrification - often involving comparatively marginalized folks and highly mobile groups, such as artists and youths - demonstrate a similar dynamic that can ultimately lead to the flourishing of new urban areas as the stages of gentrification progress.
- ItsMonkk 7mo agoYour concern can easily be addressed by having a 100% tax on the value of land and then distributing this tax money through a citizen's dividend. But this isn't all that related to the productivity dividend. That's more natural by setting banks to have a full reserve requirement. At that point new innovations would yield deflation, which would be harmful. The Fed would then have to step up and be the creator and distributor of new money. That money would then be the UBI, distributed equally to all.
- hackable_sand 7mo agoUBI frees people up to work ...