Wouldn’t this lead you to postulate that the housing crisis in America is real and out of control when the money you give them goes right into housing?
Is this how they intend to fleece America? Give people a guaranteed income paid for by their tax dollars, so it can go right into government subsidized housing, owned and run by a shadow company that the politicians and their buddies just happen to be on the board of?
Honestly if it means guaranteed housing(which it doesn't) then I'd be down with that. It's better than getting fleeced with no house.
Congratulations, you managed to make people having a place to live sound not just bad, but sinister.
"Kapitalet höjer hyrorna, och Staten bostadsbidragen."
The Swedes were calling out this game back in 1972.
Of course, our solution was to just stop subsidizing housing altogether and screw over poor people.
And if everyone got this, rents would mysteriously increase by $1000 …
Fuck these landlords.
I had no idea there were so many people who were against a UBI on Lemmy. I'm honestly surprised.
There's a lot of effort to deny any previous UBI experiment as having even been done. Heck the top reply to your comment here denies this is even a UBI experiment. The line is usually the only way to do the experiment is to do it and that's the Socialisms so we can't ever know, sorry poors.
I've been surprised and super disappointed by a lot of the views I've been seeing in Lemmy comments lately. Anti homeless, judging addiction, fairly socially conservative, buying into the whole retail theft narrative, and the worst has been the misogyny framed as "realism" or some shit.
I don't know, it's not for me.
I'd prefer decommodification of housing but UBI is probably a step in the right direction.
It makes sense....I think the FOSS/anti-big tech world brings together a weird mix of far-left socialists and also libertarian types (hence the anti UBI sentiment)
IDK, I'm a leftist, and am skeptical about UBI because it's more of a free-market approach to solving a problems, rather than just directly solving problems. I.e. the government could just build more and better homeless housing, and expand section 8 to cover more of the cost and more people. I'm a bit afraid UBI would be used as an excuse to cut social programs, in a similar way that school vouchers are used to cut spending on education and leave families paying for what the vouchers don't cover.
They spent the no-strings-attached cash mostly on housing, a study found
They had to hand it straight back to greedy landlords in order not to be evicted
Sorted that headline for you, nae bother hen
City with an absurd income-to-rental-price spread: "We're giving you some money."
People getting the money: "This will go towards the enormous debts accrued to my landlords who keep cranking up the cost of housing."
Economists: surprised-pikachu-face. "We thought for sure they would spend it on video games and fentanyl."
'oh, they have more money now.. time for it to be my money'
that happened with me with the covid checks. soon as those came out, rent went up--and up. those quickly disappeared but the rent increases are forever.
State Sen. Paul Bettencourt sent a letter to the state's attorney general asking him to declare a new program in Houston as unconstitutional.
Of course they call it unconstitutional. It actually helps people and the constitution says nothing about helping people. /s
When people can afford houses, they stop being homeless.... Amazing
When will humans learn to attack the problem and not the victim of the problem?
We need first universal Healthcare, education and affordable housing, otherwise the money would go to the leeches(landlords,insurance, student debt).
Popular opinion is that if you give people free money they will use it on what enriches their lives.
Economists would probably just point out the fact that whenever you subsidize something the thing you're trying to make easier is suddenly even more expensive to the point where there's hardly a discount if one even exists.
Look at the cash for clunkers program. At the end of that car dealerships were raking in huge profits.
In this case if you give someone a thousand bucks a month, odds are landlords will pocket the majority of that, because housing is the biggest cost for everybody who is not already an owner. If everyone has 1000/mo more, they can suddenly afford 1000/more on housing. This may make minimal impact in areas with extremely high COL, but all the associated suburbs, rough parts of town, college areas... yeah those rents are gonna go way up.
example: 4BR apartment? Oh... I guess that's another +$3500/mo... after all all four of you are getting that money for free. New price: $7000/mo. It's only 1750/mo, or 750 per person per month because the government (our tax dollars) is paying that poor, poor landlord. How ever would they survive elsewise?
Economists would probably just point out the fact that whenever you subsidize something the thing you're trying to make easier is suddenly even more expensive to the point where there's hardly a discount if one even exists.
That's a very convenient "fact" to point out if you want to eliminate all assistance for people who are struggling.
Now explain how corn subsidies had no effect on corn prices and definitely didn't result in everything being full of corn syrup.
Next explain how basic income is a subsidy.
Look at the cash for clunkers program. At the end of that car dealerships were raking in huge profits.
That was an intended effect, as they were all facing enormous deficits in the wake of the '08 housing/car-note crash. Cash-for-Clunkers was supposed to be a back door bailout of dealerships in exchange for moving high emissions vehicles off the market.
In this case if you give someone a thousand bucks a month, odds are landlords will pocket the majority of that, because housing is the biggest cost for everybody who is not already an owner.
In theory, we live in a large and competitive housing market, such that people with excess cash can change landlords in pursuit of lower prices.
In practice, what we end up with is a handful of cartelized renters all setting a clearing price for the last vacant unit at slightly above what the median renter can pay. This traps people in existing leases, because they can't find a better deal anywhere else in the city.
This has nothing to do with the cash distribution program and everything to do with the functional monopoly on housing owned by a handful of mega-landlords.
That was an intended effect, as they were all facing enormous deficits in the wake of the '08 housing/car-note crash. Cash-for-Clunkers was supposed to be a back door bailout of dealerships in exchange for moving high emissions vehicles off the market.
Hot take: the dealership system is just a useless middleman system that should have been dismantled long ago as the "only way" to buy a car.
In theory, we live in a large and competitive housing market, such that people with excess cash can change landlords in pursuit of lower prices.
Boston will never have enough supply to meet demand. This is the one example I know very well, there are countless others. A thousand bucks a month in podunk land is enough to rent something entirely and that will 100% be exploited by landlords, after all it's free money for doing nothing.
Thatchers plan would have worked if and only when:
LAND IS PROVIDED FOR NEW PROJECTS (destination plan on national provincial and local level)
ALL INCOME FROM RENT TO BUY (or similar) IS SPEND ON NEW PROJECTS
ALL PROJECTS ARE GUARANTEED BY THE BUILDER (no excess costs for any reason : sign your profitable contract but then you are obliged to deliver exactly what is promised or you'll never get another gov project again)
Paul Bettencourt sounds like a horrible person. I hope his life is as nice as he is.
The sad thing is that high cost of housing is entirely unnecessary exploitation anyway. Just pass a law that transfers all house and land ownership into collective hands and erases all dept based on houses. I bet the vast majority of people would vote for it lol.
Who's collective hands?
I Holland we have woning bouw organisaties That are BY law obliged to offer services and structured management, checked by impartial state department and who can be relieved of function (transfering the properties to another organization or splitting them up etcetera). Yes, needs to be overview, laws and such. Maybe even subsidies for new buildings.
But NO PROFIT ANYWHERE.
Not for public basic housing. Come on, do we really wanna admit RUZZIA and CHINA beat us on this?
Yeah, but there's a difference between a local housing authority, and what that guy is suggesting, which appears to be "the state now owns all property, including stuff I've already paid for".
The only people that would vote for that are people that don't vote.
I'm all for the government taking the role of building new houses everywhere, in vast numbers in order to stabilise and eventually reduce prices. We used to have this in the UK, they were called council houses and the local government rented them out at reasonable prices. Then Maggie Thatcher Milk Snatcher got in power and sold them all off, under the guise of letting people buy the property they were renting. This isn't a bad idea in itself, but there was another edge to that sword. No more properties would be allowed to be build with the proceeds. In effect it became a state sell-off. It's been fucked ever since.
No, it would BE BOUGHT by government at fair price (they know the fair price, just look your houses tax bill)
Or built by them.
And then rented out with a certain maximum rental price per Sq Mt like 10$ so 50sq m (500sq ft) = 500$/month
Most importantly, they would be obliged to make it Energy efficient by their contract with the state so much lower electric and heating bill, maybe even topped off with solar, would be small percentage of a new building but cut costs for actual people.
Not saying it's perfect in Holland (they have shortages because no new land available to build new social housing projects), but it sure works!
I kept it deliberately vague, but the main idea is democracy and public accountability, and that we need to take certain things out of corporate hands. Because it only optimizes for profit and not for social benefit or the nation's benefit. Basically all the fundamental needs of the people need to become a kind of guaranteed basic right - food water shelter education and communication. And there could be multiple different models.
There are widespread and established neoliberal myths now that only "private" institutions can work efficiently and unbiased. Definitely based on Thatcher, Reagan, Kohl, and then perpetrated by the "third way" leftists that declared democracy as an inefficient tool to order society.
But you can establish institutions with more useful motivations and that are more intelligent to withstand things like shortages. With things like healthcare you actually do want less efficiency, e.g. in a pandemic.
Right now it seems unthinkable, but with the climate and other crisis looming it might become feasible. At least if we have the actual ideology "at the ready".
This is one of mine. I started lobbying for it in 2015 when even all in our group looked at me like I'm crazy. Not so crazy now, am I?
Before anyone asks, Austin is very much so a small town in some ways. Many tech folk moved in for the dot-com boom and never left because we fell in love with the town. We also stayed friends and we communicate often, even as we all moved on to do bigger and better things. Sometimes, all it takes is an e-mail thread to make change.
If there is a pot hole on the street, and the city isn't fixing it, organize a few people. You might find that someone in your community has the tools you need, and someone else has left over materials.
It's a GOOD thing this ended! If they enacted this NATIONWIDE my Rent might Increase! Because it OBVIOUSLY hasn't increased at ALL since I moved in thanks to not having a UBI!
The study didn’t give us the answer we wanted so we burned the results and cut social programs some more.
Didn't this basically happen like 10-15 years ago in Canada? I remember hearing about a similar study being shut down and the records sealed when the new conservative administration at the time came into power.
It's always "this small test just wouldn't work on a larger scale, so let's never try at all."
Texas figured this out? Texas? This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts.
Just because Austin is the capital, you really shouldn't confuse it with Texas. Austin isn't Texas.
Source: I am a former Austinite and one of the long time lobbyists for this program. I started harassing my contacts in 2015.
To all the people saying "hur dur it's just giving money to landlords":
No it's not. People who would not have had housing were able to have it. If you think that's a bad thing because some landlords got paid in the process, you seriously need to have your moral compass checked.
To those explicitly linking this to the idea (which is often cited but never backed up with evidence) that landlords (and mysteriously no other segment of the economy) will medically capture 110% of the value of any possible UBI program: This is not the evidence you've been lacking. The money wasn't given to everyone as it would be in a universal basic income program. It was given to people who were struggling. Of fucking course people who were homeless or near homeless spent the money on rent. The fact that people who become able to afford housing mostly choose to spend their money on housing just tells you how much people value having a place to live. It says nothing about how money would flow in a full scale system.
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