Landlords can't simply arbitrarily raise rents like that. If they could, they would already charge every individual tenant 100% of their income. Renting is a market like any other, and markets have limits and competition. The renters that do try to increase rent by $1000 will simply not have tenants anymore, and those that didn't, would, because UBI means people can basically move anywhere, any time they like.
It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
That can happen because of a new subway station, a hot new employer nearby, or simply because money appeared in their pockets.
If money were no object, more people would live in high COL areas, not fewer. You know this is true because you see it in the prices.
To prevent rent increases you’d need people all to have $n appeared in their pockets and to have a pact not to then spend $n to upgrade their living arrangements. The cruel irony of course being if everyone attempts to upgrade, then no one achieves an upgrade but they do achieve spending their new money!
Additional income is not additional willingness to pay 100% of that income forthe currently-purchased quality and quantity of one particular good or service, and even if it was that's a demand shift which without a supply change, will still result in a smaller increase in rent.
UBI, which any realistic method of implementing makes a shift in income from somewhere higher on the income spectrum to somewhere lower (the exact shift being defined by the UBI level and financing mechanism), most likely (if it replaces existing means tested welfare programs) most favoring a level somewhere above where current welfare programs start tapering off, does have some predictable price effects, but they aren't “all rents go up by an amount equal to the UBI amount times the number of recipients typically living in similar units”.
First order, they are some price increases across goods and services disproportionately demanded by the group benefitting in net, with some price decreases across those disproportionately demanded by the group paying in net. These will vary by elasticity, but in total should effect some (but less than total) compression of the time money shift, reducing somewhat the real cost to those paying and the real benefit to those receiving, but with less effect on those paying because of lower marginal propensity to spend with higher income.
Beyond first order is more complicated because you have to work through demand changes,and supply chnages caused by labor market changes from reduced economic coercion, increased labor market mobility and ability to retrain for more-preferred jobs, which are going to decreased supply for some jobs, increase supply for others (though on different schedules), etc.
> It’s not “arbitrary.” It’s raising rents for the same reason rents are ever raised: people’s willingness/ability to pay has gone up.
The only landlords who can afford to operate this way own many, many units. A long term tenant who pays in a predictable manner and isn't actively damaging property is worth their weight in gold, and you can't afford to roll the dice on the next tenant unless you're able to spread the risk and cost of the churn around.
All rents are set by the market's willingness and ability to pay.
No matter whether you're the 40th percentile (a vacancy-sensitive landlord) on price or the 90th (a vacancy-insensitive landlord), the dollar value of the underlying distribution is defined by the market's willingness and ability to pay. If that goes up, the entire distribution moves to the right.
Does your rent go up by the precise amount of your increase in income every year? Mine doesn't. My landlord isn't checking my W2 or tax statements for extra rent money, that isn't how it works.
The assumption that all rents, everywhere, would go up by the amount of UBI is the definition of "arbitrary."
>Are we talking about one person’s income going up, or knowably every single person’s income going up by a known amount?
What does it matter?
You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
Rents can rise based on minimum wage, but all renters do not raise their rents precisely by the increase in minimum wage.
And when high paying employers come to an area, not all renters raise rents accordingly.
You're ignoring that market forces exist affecting rent other than the simple greed of landlords. Not every landlord would increase rent by the amount of UBI because there is an obvious market opportunity in not doing so, and because not every property could justify that, even with UBI.
> You're claiming landlords have the ability to set rents directly based on a tenant's income.
I'm a landlord. My agent figures out the rent to charge on my behalf. They do this by making an informed guess as to what the market can bear — sometimes they've been wrong, and had to reduce the asking rate.
That is, mechanistically, how they discover what the market can bear.
If everyone gets £1000 UBI money each month, everyone can afford to pay £1000 more rent than before. Some agents will guess this means everyone can afford £500 more rent, some will guess higher, some will guess lower. They'll discover through this process of guessing and seeing what happens, how much people can actually pay.
This is complicated by all the other concurrent changes, including:
(1) the scenario of no-more-work-needed suggests that some of the tenants will move to wherever the rent is lowest rather than where their previous commute was shortest
(2) no-more-work-possible meaning money supply goes down rather than up
(3) people won't need to spend a huge amount of money commuting, not just time, which may increase personal money supply (just not by as much as the loss of income from not working)
(4) if they actually like the homes enough to want to spend all day in them, rather 5 hours awake and inside because the other 19 hours of the day are 8 asleep, 2 commuting, 8 working, and 1 lunch break; UBI being claimed by 500 people who all officially live in the same 1 bed flat in a Norfolk village, but they're all actually spending their money on living in relatively cheap safari cabins in Botswana or whatever, is a very different dynamic than everyone staying put to keep close to friends and family.
(On the plus side, if we have robot workers so cheap there's no point hiring humans any more, then we may also get a lot more high-quality housing for a price of next-to-nothing).
No landlord is looking at a particular tenant's income under the microscope and adjusting their rent. But, of course they do it in aggregate based on averages. UBI shifts the overall demand curve, and every supplier of goods will adjust their prices proportionally.
