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I certainly hope you're right. All I picture is the dollar stores suddenly becoming $2 stores as everything just shifts to be more expensive with very few people improving their financial situation at all.
The funny part is that you're describing things that are happening in my country and we don't even have UBI.
Our Dollar stores are already $2+ dollar stores. Anything that's $1 is smaller than it was a decade ago, or is fewer units than it used to be.
The price of all kinds of stuff is increasing in price, and rent is already completely unaffordable, including places that are multi-hour commutes away from the places with jobs.
Someone working full time at minimum wage will not make enough money to rent a studio apartment, let alone also be able to afford groceries and other essentials. They'd need to rent a room, get a second job, or be born 10 years earlier and be in a rent-controlled place.
So yeah, with UBI, more people are going to be able to do things like...
Things will get more expensive. But we live in an open market. Stores and brands will compete with each other for some of that extra money. Some people will be spending it on "fun stuff", and I think that's where we'd see prices increase the most. And I'm okay with new video games being $120 (like they used to be sometimes!) if it means we get UBI.
Doesn't that just further validate my concerns? Prices are going up to gouge people even when a lot of people don't have the cash to pay for it. I see no reason why a landlord charging $15,000 a year won't just up it to $25,000 a year when everyone gets a $10k UBI. The government seems to care very little about preventing things like that.
I understand that there are solutions that could fix this, I just don't think the US government as it is now would be willing to enact or enforce them even if it went ahead with UBI. That's why my initial post said we need to figure out these things before UBI, or else we'll enact it without things like taxes for vacant units or rent control between renters, and it'll fail, killing any enthusiasm for another attempt following potential law changes to fix the issues.
Can landlords just change rent whenever they feel like it in the US?
Essentially. They can't freely change rent for current tenants since they need to stay within the confines of whatever lease was agreed upon, but they can make rent whatever they want for new tenants, so it's not an uncommon occurrence for them to simply stop fixing things in a timely manner so that current tenants feel compelled to leave, and then they can fill the space, charging whatever they feel someone will pay for rent after that. It's scummy, and it's technically illegal, but everyone knows they won't really get in trouble for it.
Same thing happens where I live, but there is recourse. If it were me, I'd probably try to fix things on my own if I were getting a great deal on rent. Not that I'd have to, but to save myself from having to move. Of course, that's not an option for everyone.
Still, with a lot of the rental market (again, where I live) being newcomers, I don't think it'd make sense to immediately jack up the rates... they'd be turning away too much of the market.
Well, once the lease is over people have to sign a new one anyway, so even existing tenants can only lock in rates for so long. And when one landlord ups rent, it's usually because all the other landlords are doing it too - it seems like they do it in unison, I imagine because they don't want to have to worry about people leaving for somewhere cheaper. I'm not sure if it's illegal like price fixing or not, but it doesn't seem to make a difference in the end.