> I also want you to think about what stops your landlord from raising your rent by $1000 / month right now. Like, why not just go for it?
Answering as a landlord (I have one property I used to live in that I rent out), the reason I don't just keep raising rent is mainly because I like my tenant and want to be fair to them. Having had bad tenants in the past, a good tenant is worth their weight in gold.
More relevant to your question though, the other reason is because I know there's a ceiling after a certain point where the number of people who have the money to rent my property starts to shrink and the time it would take to find a new tenant would cost more than the amount of money I would make by raising rent.
If rent is $2000/mo and raising it by $100/mo means it's going to take an extra month to find a tenant, then I need to believe that that tenant is going to stay for at least 20 months to break even.
If everyone all of a sudden has an extra $1000/mo I could be fairly certain that my tenant won't be priced out if I were to raise rent a few hundred dollars.
Thanks - I hadn't thought to mention the risk of trying to raise rent but it's a good note. I was mostly getting at how the conditions in the UBI scenario ("everyone could pay $1000 more in rent if I insisted") is often true now and the 1:1 rent raising wouldn't happen under UBI for similar reasons that it doesn't happen now.
I also think people tend to under-rate the softer side of landlord / tenant relationships[1]. It's better to have a tenant who you get along with and who cooperates with how you want to rent a place. It's nice not to fight with your landlord. There's some economic value there too, but it's hard to quantify. I'm kind of interested in housing interventions that ban large companies from holding too many units of housing. It mostly "puts a ceiling" on how much profit one company can derive from many rental units, but actually I'm not sure I care - and trying to maximize the human connection between the person who owns the building and the people who live in it seems sensible.
[1] To be fair, when push does come to shove, a reason to under-rate them is the landlord looses some months of rent while the tenant becomes homeless. It pushes people towards strategic thinking.
Answering as a landlord (I have one property I used to live in that I rent out), the reason I don't just keep raising rent is mainly because I like my tenant and want to be fair to them. Having had bad tenants in the past, a good tenant is worth their weight in gold.
More relevant to your question though, the other reason is because I know there's a ceiling after a certain point where the number of people who have the money to rent my property starts to shrink and the time it would take to find a new tenant would cost more than the amount of money I would make by raising rent.
If rent is $2000/mo and raising it by $100/mo means it's going to take an extra month to find a tenant, then I need to believe that that tenant is going to stay for at least 20 months to break even.
If everyone all of a sudden has an extra $1000/mo I could be fairly certain that my tenant won't be priced out if I were to raise rent a few hundred dollars.