I wrote a big long article for you, but realized you’d counter with the idea that landlords will collectively decide to hike rents no matter what.
So, the simple argument that UBI will not increase minimum rents by 2k a month overnight with no improvement in living conditions: landlords will have to compete to get the UBI out of individuals hands. Right now, the lowest income housing isn’t in competition for individuals, it’s competing for government approval and integration. If everyone individually has 2k a month to spend, they have the luxury of shopping around.
>“UBI lets all the poor people leave” is not convincing at all.
The value proposition for service workers in high-COL cities like SF is probably already bad. How would UBI make it worse? At least it'd be easier to move away from those areas. Maybe cities would have to pay serivce workers more to make sure they stay.
Rents are high in SF because there is extremely high demand for those apartments at high prices, because they allow access to high incomes. The value of living in SF for a random serivce worker is not increased by them getting a $2k UBI cheque, it is decreased. For the tech workers driving the demand, $2k a month is not going to do much to change the value they assign to housing in SF either way. So I do not see how the UBI cheques would increase demand, and therefore rent, for housing in SF.
1. You didn't provide any actual evidence or deeper claims than (putting something in parenthesis). I don't really believe the coal mine claim, as in reality we don't see that happening. Mining towns are still among the cheapest and poorest towns in America.
2. That's a really naive sense of economic productivity. Here is a thought experiment.
A) Let's shut down all of Amazon HQ1.
B) Let's shut down the dams that provide 86% of Seattle greater area's electricity.
Which one of these entities is ACTUALLY responsible for that "productivity" then? And I bet you rents in Seattle without electricity would drop far greater proportionally than they do out by the dams. Rent follows incomes, not productivity.
There is no deeper claim being made. We are saying the same thing. You can call it income if you'd like. A person's wages are some portion of their productivity. The distinction is irrelevant for this point.
“UBI lets all the poor people leave” is not convincing at all.