We have seen an element of this in the UK where housing benefit largely ended up in the laps of landlords.

The move from single-income to double-income families produced far less than a doubled standard of living, but it drove housing prices sky high. It's an interesting natural experiment for what we might see with UBI programs (which act a lot like adding a 'free' wage-earner to each household).

And besides, I think a most of the other people doing cool stuff will want cheaper accommodation as well, and over time particular kinds of cool stuff will congregate in different smaller towns.

That wealth can be used to consume the same amount of goods/services that it could have before the redistribution, but now many users get to make those consumption choices instead of one or few.

Yes, this redistribution will have a massive impact on the _pricing_ of different goods and services within an overall market. However, total wealth (ability to consume in aggregate) will remain the same within that market.

Or alternatively the stores could compete by offering better service, in which case people benefit from that.

But a bit of inflation may not be the worst thing – the current almost-deflation is a lot worse and both private and public debts could finally be lowered. Unfortunately, it's a pretty imprecise mechanisms and there are some people that suffer disproportionally such as those around retirement age getting fixed pensions.

Everyone just magically has enough money to buy 'the basics', but can't use the money for anything else, in fact they never see the total.

What happens the the price of 'the basics' then? What happens when everyone can afford to not be wanting?

There are probably 'better' basics, for example penthouse apartments, but those will are all already above basic, so buying caviar or high end steak might be off the table.

What would happen if demand is just met?

The money would need to be spent anyway, these are basics. Not having spent it would result in what? More crime, more jail time, worse medical outcomes? All of that sounds like expense to the population at large, in the form of emergencies that use social safety nets.

I think the argument for UBI / BIG is that it identifies the root cause of the expenses and attempts to just fix the problem (by, for example, having a basic minimum of housing, or in the case of areas where housing costs too much; causing more housing to be built).

EDIT: To add to this, it's worth pointing out that many corner stores in low income neighborhoods already take advantage of peoples' lack of access to easy transportation to charge unusually high prices for common convenience store items. It's already more expensive to be poor, and I think basic income would just increase the predatory practices that are already happening.

There are plenty of discount stores that are working their way in, e.g. Dollar General, Family Dollar, but they don't have control over the rents either and in alot of larger cities they also are facing opposition from the small businesses that would be out of business since they would have no chance of competing on price at that point.

Whether having every small bodega or other small retail shop replaced by 7-11, Dollar General, Family Dollar, etc. and yet another avenue for access to the middle class shutdown is worth the affordable prices for everyone else is debatable. I can see both sides of this anyways.

I think predatory practices will decrease because people will be voting with their feet, no longer constrained by where they live.

Economy of scale. Given fixed size of the UBI check, you want to live where services are cheapest. And services will be cheapest in places where more people are serviced together, because that cuts down on distribution costs and other such overheads.

Also, areas where people who have more money than just UBI live, would have higher prices simply by virtue of there being more money in the local economy. This isn't really dissimilar from the existing arrangement, where rich areas are expensive to live in, and so there's natural geographic segregation. But UBI would boost this into high gear.

To clarify, I am a strong proponent of UBI personally. But I think we should be really careful with these kinds of unintended side effects, and try to anticipate and manage them before they cause a bigger mess than what we're trying to address.

Also, have a look at this: https://medium.com/migration-issues/should-a-universal-basic...

Huge retailers today offer worse prices, lower quality and lousy service because they can get away with this, being the only game in town.

At the same time, rent in cities skyrocketed, making low-density and rural places much more affordable.

We now know that economy of scale peters off at some fixed scale.

Also not everybody can afford to move.

Basic income is precisely about "afford" part.

Those who won't move will benefit too because landlords will have to work on retention.

This assumes that basic income either includes an allowance for moving or contains enough of a surplus over basic needs that savings can be accumulated.

He can try, but then he'd lose out to competing landlords who don't raise rents as much (or at all). It's like gas stations; owners know that people are willing to buy almost as much gas at $3/gallon as they are at $2. But when the price of oil falls, they can't just keep charging $3, because their competitors will charge less and take all their customers.