[benmanns]

It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs (relative to a straight 100% increase relative to the basic income). So you might send everyone $100 per month and costs go up $100 per month, until supply chains shift towards supplying lower income humans with more goods and services than they used to get, at which point costs will decrease (from the $100 increase).

With enough forewarning, suppliers could anticipate the increased demand and prepare for it.

[raldi]

Not if desirable places restrict zoning in a way that prevents more housing from being legal to build.

[falcor84]

A major factor in what makes places more desirable is access to jobs. In the case of full UBI, it will be easier to: stay unemployed, negotiate a remote work contract or launch a new venture from anywhere, so I expect that we'll see people spread out a lot more.

[triceratops]

No need to stay in a "desirable place" (read: place with jobs) if you have UBI.

[chimeracoder]

> It does, however, make providing housing more profitable, which, on the margins, will drive more landlords and home builders into the market, decreasing long term costs

Landlords are, by and large, not the ones who create new housing units, and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

[mrguyorama]

>and "lack of profit potential is" also generally not the main impedance to creating new housing in most locations either.

It somewhat is. Housing builders can only do so many projects per whatever cycle they run. They will optimize towards building fewer projects that are highly profitable rather than building tons of low income housing or starter homes that each have much lower profit.

Builders don't want to scale up, they want to make money. Building would also be abysmal to scale up anyway, because it's somewhat skilled labor that you pay peanuts for.

This is just one of the ways that wealth inequality results in market failures.

People with lots and lots of wealth value each individual dollar significantly less, and are therefore willing to part with significantly more dollars per unit of service or product. That means you always get a much higher profit margin targeting stupid rich people than anything else. So everything is built around bilking these dumb but wealthy people for everything you can, and nobody builds or sells much to the poorer people. This drives prices for things up in general, and starves the market of oxygen for meeting the needs of less wealthy people.

Ask any developer, big or small, who their target market is, and they will not say "poor people" and this has been true for decades, and the difference between "poor" and "not poor" has only continued to grow.

[jandrese]

Really, any place where building falls behind demand you should expect the lower profit affordable housing to be the first projects cancelled. Economically it only makes sense to service the affordable housing market if the luxury housing market is too saturated to support more projects.