But we do have lots of housing, it's just located in places people don't want to live. Rents are high in places they do want to be, and that's partly a positional thing -- if you want to live where the top-10% of earners live, you need to bid against them for housing.

Thing is, requirement for on-site employment requires you to live where lots of people live; only the very wealthy can afford to live in places without jobs nearby - as UBI decouples income from where you live, then it would be a pressure to equalize rents, as underemployed people - the demand for whose labor is decreasing and will decrease further - can afford live in the many places which are currently shedding population because of lack of jobs despite being actually very nice to live in.

Maybe. But the counter is that entrepreneurship has strong network effects, it really pays to be around other talented people and hear about the future they're busy inventing. Maybe we'd see the opposite, people leaving a stable job which ties them to some unexciting place, to try to make it in NYC.

> But the counter is that entrepreneurship has strong network effects, it really pays to be around other talented people and hear about the future they're busy inventing.

The actual powerful network effects are essentially a somewhat benign form of cronyism, not mere inspiration from other entrepreneurs. People do more business with less haggling with friends than with strangers.

> People do more business with less haggling with friends than with strangers.

This is how humans work. This cannot change with UBI.

Agreed, wasn't trying to claim that it would, just pointing out that network effects are not about inspiration, mainly.

I think you're talking about networking for money, and that's a thing.

But there are also ideas. Even in fields where there's basically no money, half the world's innovation happening within a circle of a few miles is routine. For instance this happens in music, repeatedly.

When has it happened with music in the last 60 years? If you’re talking about mostly classical music clusters then there are a lot more reasons for that than you’re suggesting

Have you heard of this thing called "the internet"?

And do you know where the web got invented? At one of the biggest cathedrals ever built to the idea that bringing lots of scientists into close proximity to work on hard problems tends to produce neat stuff.

Sure, on some level he could have done the same work in his garage, in some quiet seaside town full of retired people. But he didn't.

Reducing the friction in long-range interactions obviously has its upsides. But these hairless primates still pick up lots of stuff from being around each other.

and, afford to risk starting their own business. Maybe something simple, maybe something that will grow.

Right now, only the wealthy can really risk things.

Exactly. The high costing of housing really has more to do with the type of person you've living around/near, than the house.

From this angle, a UBI is even more powerful, in that it will go a lot further in areas that are less economically productive, and let us use "surplus" housing there.

Ideally we'd just let more people live closer together like they want to, but the elites won't let more people get close to them.

> it's just located in places people don't want to live

Often because there aren't any good jobs there. With UBI entrepreneurs can self-select and live in places with low rent and weak job markets.

The supply of housing in the places people do want to live is artificially constrained, intentionally driving up prices to achieve the New Segregation.

When you write 'enough housing to go around' you are thinking about housing everyone in need. In a free market economy 'enough housing to go around' means enough real estate assets to safely park capital (for example Chinese one).

The "not enough housing to go around" isn't because of a "free market" (if such a thing even exists), it's because wealthy people have enforced housing austerity and refuse to allow new housing to be built near them. Without wealthy people controlling zoning and restricting what can be built, far more people would be building their own homes, or would at least be allowed to pool together to build. Instead we hand over huge imputed rents to landlords and make anybody who is not super wealthy fight each other for the remains.

I think we should have robust social housing, as in Vienna or Singapore. But one thing that both places do that we do not is allow for far more housing to be built per person in high-demand areas (i.e. pricy areas). Their defining characteristic for affordability isn't so much the social housing, it's that they build for everyone as if housing were a human right, rather than a financial investment vehicle like we treat it here by enforcing scarcity.

To the extent that there is a "free market" it's only on existing housing once it's built. For existing housing, we let the wealthy do whatever they want, and use their market power to buy whatever they want, including hoarding it. However, it's only because of housing austerity in the building of housing that this real estate becomes such a sought after commodity. It is only through scarcity and austerity of building permits that continued financial climbs are guaranteed.

Most of the political spectrum in the US has housing completely wrong, and thinks that everything is going to be OK if they can just keep the "wrong" people out. Instead, we should adopt radical inclusion and welcome all people, and adopt the true belief that everyone deserves housing, every single person. Not just the cool ones, everyone. That is, unless we want to continue the current meatgrinder of capitalism. Eviction may be the blades at the end of the grinder, but the auger is the housing scarcity and exclusion practiced by nearly every single person in the US.

If rich people were the ones who had to build their estates far away, (instead of lower-middle class suburbs being pushed away from the urban areas) we'd have light rail and all sorts of ways for them to easily commute.

Meaning that, unless you fix housing, UBI doesn't make a difference.

I would think almost the opposite. The prices are high where there are high incomes--California, NY, Boston, Washington...

If you don't need to chase a high income, you can move where there's cheaper rent and try to innovate there. Assuming that you don't need any of the spatial resources of the expensive areas. (A big if... but perhaps you can grow your idea then move to the areas with lots of capital.)