Re:Sam Altman and Andrew Yang talk UBI
by AnthonyMouse on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @01:19PM
(#21929525)
They still can't, because they're not even local monopolies.
There are a thousand local landlords. If they all decided to double rents, maybe only 5% of the local population would move out, but then 5% of the landlords would have empty properties. They're individually better off to get someone in there at a lower rent than have an empty unit, so they advertise a lower rent and take one of the tenants from a landlord across the street. Now that landlord has the empty unit and they do the same thing.
Which means Kansas City is competition for Austin even if 95% of the people there would never actually move. (Assuming cities where the job market, amenities and so on are similar.)
Also, when rents are higher, there is incentive to build new housing to capture the profits.
Rents only get high when they're not just eager to arbitrarily raise rents but somehow colluding to constrain supply, which is hard for thousands of landlords to do except through zoning. But that's completely independent from how much money the local people have. There are cities that have the same median income and higher rents because the local government imposes housing supply constraints.
There are a thousand local landlords. If they all decided to double rents, maybe only 5% of the local population would move out, but then 5% of the landlords would have empty properties. They're individually better off to get someone in there at a lower rent than have an empty unit, so they advertise a lower rent and take one of the tenants from a landlord across the street. Now that landlord has the empty unit and they do the same thing.
Which means Kansas City is competition for Austin even if 95% of the people there would never actually move. (Assuming cities where the job market, amenities and so on are similar.)
Also, when rents are higher, there is incentive to build new housing to capture the profits.
Rents only get high when they're not just eager to arbitrarily raise rents but somehow colluding to constrain supply, which is hard for thousands of landlords to do except through zoning. But that's completely independent from how much money the local people have. There are cities that have the same median income and higher rents because the local government imposes housing supply constraints.