> I would like law to fix their bargaining positions, because I think that's a place that law is capable of working effectively and that it would be good for society for it to do so.

There are ways to do that, but some of them are better than others. For example, institute a UBI and the person barely making ends meat will be doing better and be able to afford the lease with the notice.

In general, the policies that work are the ones that don't try to micromanage anything or prohibit anything. If people are choosing something, assume it's not because they're idiots. Give them more choices, not fewer.

For example, a great way to help the poor is to have tuition-free community colleges, or encourage anything that lowers housing prices. But we don't really have that. Instead we subsidize student loan interest and mortgage interest, because that's more profitable to the banks who lobbied for it and the for-profit colleges and existing landowners it allows to inflate prices into the sky.

The problem with programs to help the poor is that the ones that actually do are expensive and don't pass, while the ones that pass will claim to but really do something else that most of the time makes things worse, completely by design from the perspective of the people who proposed it because they profit from it.

Better to have a UBI than subsidized loan interest, but better to have nothing than subsidized loan interest. Many "solutions" produce negative progress.

Instituting an UBI will only make rents more expensive and above the UBI level. It happened with government guaranteed housing credit in certain EU countries. The credit upper threshold was max 60k euros, so good luck finding cheaper options because everything starts at 60k now, even old apartments. If the gov't screws too much with the economy, it will screw people back.

That's because it's a housing credit instead of a UBI. If you give people money they can only use for housing, they use it for housing and the price of housing increases relative to the price of everything else (including wages).

If you give them money they can use for anything, it doesn't increase the real cost of anything in particular, it only reduces the relative disparity between the rich and the poor.