• Ferrous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    6 months ago

    UBI is pointless so long as there are landlords who can jack up rent. It is essentially a landlord subsidy, and it does nothing to address actual contradictions within capitalism.

    • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      6 months ago

      The landlord problem is indeed a problem, but UBI isn’t mean to address that specific flaw in society, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it until we fix everything, it just means that certain landlords will get to enjoy an additional subsidy for a little while.

      • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        I would argue that killing all the landlords requires nothing else, abd we just need to execute in the right order

        • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Nah. Rent should be free

          Nobody needs to grift out a cut.

          My landlord is a billionaire in Vegas, he owns thousands of properties, and you cannot convince me he contributes to any of them, only that you have brain damage or no connection to reality.

            • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              7
              arrow-down
              3
              ·
              6 months ago

              Sure, everything needs a parasitic grifter middle man exploiting everyone who needs it.

              I forgot we live in the fucking USSR.

              • Miaou@jlai.lu
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                6 months ago

                Funny that you’re using this as an insult when home ownership is one of the few things the USSR unmistakably did better than the west.

                • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  6 months ago

                  Fair point. But also it needles at capitalist pug fuckers to compare their bullshit to standard USSR bullshit, even if in this specific category the USSR was just completely fucking better.

                  I feel like its dead and gone and never cared about truth, so using it to piss off capitalists by making it sound even worse than it was (but still better than them) is the best memorial it could ask for.

              • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                arrow-down
                10
                ·
                6 months ago

                parasitic grifter middle man exploiting everyone who needs it.

                Giving someone who can’t buy a house, the ability to purchase a place to live without doing so, is exploitation? It’s literally just adding an option that person wouldn’t have otherwise, lmao.

                • Pika@sh.itjust.works
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  6 months ago

                  The main question is if the rental price is less than the mortgage. I just recently experienced that a few months back when I was started looking for a house. The cost to rent it monthly was in some cases 3-400$ more than what the bank would have offered me for a mortgage. So my options were between trying to get a loan to get a house via mortgage and have something of value at the end of my loan. Or rent for equal or more expensive, get zero value back and have to deal with a middle man for every thing that ever goes wrong with the house fight that person every length of the way for any changes to the house. I think it’s obvious what my choice is going to be.

                  I’m thankfully in one of the better cases though, my family in Florida tells me about how it’s getting to the point where you can’t buy property there anymore, it’s all been purchased by people/buisness for use as Airbnb or rent out has a dedicated residence, which makes it extremely difficult for any of their kids to go out on their own because anything that’s decent has been taken and anything that remains is areas you would not want to live in. Their HOA is in the process of banning the practice thankfully but it’s apperently an issue.

                  Firmly believe that housing should be a “is this your primary residence? If not are you there at least once every 6 months?” and if you can’t answer yes to either of those questions it should be forced to be sold on the market. Remove the damn middleman from the equations.

                  • Jax@sh.itjust.works
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    2
                    ·
                    6 months ago

                    Businesses shouldn’t need to be run out of your home, but other than that yes I agree.

                  • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
                    link
                    fedilink
                    arrow-up
                    1
                    arrow-down
                    4
                    ·
                    6 months ago

                    How is it taking a cut? And that last sentence also makes no sense; if you remove the landlord from the equation, the house they owned, is now NOT owned, by anyone. The would-be renter can’t afford to buy it themself, so now they have nowhere to live.

    • menemen@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      A functioning social network will cover the rents. Still, this makes controlling rents even more important as otherwise the social network will become non viable or even a way of redistributing public wealth to said landlords.

      • Jax@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Do you expect landlords en masse to change their ways based on isolated experiments? Why would the ramifications of UBI be felt in isolated environments?

        “Yes, should the economic system in place stay exactly the same - UBI is great! Now let’s go ahead and give everyone UBI and ensure that the economic system does not stay exactly the same.”

        Edit: hopefully my point is clear. You cannot expect landlords to adapt to UBI in any other way.

        • Dadifer@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          6 months ago

          I think its main function is to redistribute wealth from taxes on the rich and to decrease the wealth gap. So it would fundamentally alter the dynamics of the economy.

          • Jax@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            6 months ago

            I know, that’s my point, which means that landlords will adapt in response to the surplus of cash. Unless something is done to prevent it, the landlords will absolutely adapt with the shifting economy. The bottom line is the same: you need someplace to live, they want your money.

    • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      6 months ago

      What’s the impact on mobility though of lower socioeconomic people?

      Suddenly you have hundreds of millions of people who don’t need to be in economic centres for work and can move wherever they want without affecting their income.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      6 months ago

      In places where UBI has been tested, this effect has been extremely minor.

      My hypothesis as to why: supply and demand for rental space are both somewhat elastic.

      • shikitohno@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        6 months ago

        Has there been a case of UBI being tested at large scale yet, ie. everyone in a given city or province getting it? If you know that literally everyone who lives where you’re renting a property has suddenly been given $1,000-$2,000 more a month, it’s a lot easier to pull off raising rents across the board and knowing you won’t just have mass evictions compared to a test situation where you have a relatively small number of individuals throughout the community being given the same amount.

          • shikitohno@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            6 months ago

            Out of all those linked, only the programs in Namibia and Iran actually seem to apply to everyone in the designated area. Even then, I don’t think the folks in the Namibian village are really worried about paying rent for their shanty town shacks, from the way it’s portrayed in the cited article. I don’t know enough about Iran to comment there. That aside, the remaining examples are pretty limited in their scope and mostly target poor people.

            Recivitas has been running a privately funded basic income for a small, impoverished rural community in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil for three years now. Recivitas was founded and is run by Bruna Augusto Pereira and Marcus Vinicius Brancaglione. The project pays 30 Brazilian Reias (about US$15) per month to people in the community of Quatinga Velho, Sao Paulo, Brazil. This amount of money sounds very small to people from industrialized countries, but it has a large impact in a rural area of Brazil.

            Sounds impressive, but not so much when you actually look it up to see only 67 people were getting paid under the program. Even less impressive when you consider Quatinga as a district has a population of 3,762 people, and the whole district consists of the town of Quantiga and two smaller settlements.

            Mincome likewise wasn’t universal, just targeting lower-income residents in the test sites.

            The remaining cases more or less list out their restrictions on the page you linked to.

            It’s a significant for would-be scummy landlords. If everyone in the UK were to start receiving an unconditional £1,000/month, or everyone in the state of New Jersey gets $1,600/month, landlords would know that everyone has the money to pay if they raise the rent to cover the majority of this payment. If it’s only poor people getting it, this becomes harder to be able to pull off and not just wind up with vacant units. Especially when you’re talking about miniscule payments like R$ 30. Even in the sticks in Brazil, that’s not putting a real dent in anyone’s rent. Granted, it’s not apples to oranges, but R$ 30 in São Paulo gets you a plain hamburger. Like, it doesn’t even get you halfway to buying a pizza.

            Yes, I am familiar with price elasticity. Are you familiar with the last several decades of parasitic behavior from landlords and the real estate industry? Everyone needs a place to live, and unless there are regulations put in place to limit their anti-social behavior, these group would certainly do their best to bleed us dry of as much as they could if they knew everyone suddenly had increased income. We aren’t building housing at anywhere near the rate we need to, especially housing that would be affordable to the working class. They know they have us over a barrel for this in many ways, and will abuse us in every way they can without running afoul of legal repercussions.