Because tenants are not scarce. If you cut your prices, you lose $200/mo forever. If you simply follow the maximum market price and wait, someone will fill your room eventually and you have them locked into a higher rate forever.

Competition doesn't work for necessities. Someone will rent your room at any price because it's necessary for survival. One of the major crises of our time is the fact that there are more people who need housing than there are rooms to rent to them.

Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price. Getting tenants in rooms a few months earlier at the cost of lower rent means you make less money, and are less competitive as a business.

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Anon1096 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.

> Why don't landlords undercut one another? They literally don't have to. The only outcome is less profit. You'll find a tenant eventually, at any price.

is very obviously not true, otherwise prices right now would be effectively infinite. Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?

The answer is always supply and demand. As long as the supply is constrained or demand goes up faster the price will rise. But UBI doesn't change that math at all. (I say this as someone not actually a fan of UBI)

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randerson 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> You're failing to explain what dictates the price the market will bear.

Most people like to live in the nicest place they can afford. This is a force pulling prices upward when many people with excess cash are competing for a limited supply of homes. Its why you'll pay more for the same size property in a wealthy neighborhood.

> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k?

Because some people in SF can only afford 3K/month. But if you added 3k/month to literally everyone's income, that number would increase.

(In case you're wondering why the many people with more than 3k/month don't crowd those people out: the wealthy depend on those 3k/month people for labor. At least for now.)

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estearum 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Why are prices for an apartment in SF only 3k/mo instead of 30k? Surely under your reasoning a landlord could just wait and get a tenant at any price they set?

No, because local wages cannot sustain those prices

If local wages could sustain those prices, then yes all rents would rise to that new higher local income level

That is (quite self-evidently) prices are so phenomenally high in ultra high-income areas like SF

Every single landlord is setting prices by the same metric: what can the people who would live here be able to afford? Competition between landlords is almost nil, which is why you find almost no "deals" anywhere. The market is totally efficient. Everyone agrees on how to set prices: by local wages.

	▲	cogman10 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Competition between landlords is almost nil In fact, collusion with the likes of yeildstar is the name of the game. Everyone is setting prices based on what the algorithm tells them to set prices and they all benefit from that uprise in prices because there's basically no competition decreasing the price. There's also been a steady consolidation of ownership of rental units which also artificially increases prices. There's a reason nowhere in the country at this point has affordable housing.

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PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Everything you've written here presupposes a housing shortage.

Fixing the housing shortage is a central tenet of progressive policies (regardless of whether or not they may ever actually accomplish this).

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estearum 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Housing will always fall short of demand. Nobody, progressive or not, is actually willing to sustain an oversupply of housing.

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PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This just isn't true across the time and space of human cultures and civilizations. There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.

The current problems have tended to arise when desirable work is geographically limited which then leads to a much larger housing shortage in those areas despite the presence of sufficient housing across a broader territory.

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estearum 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> There are plenty of places, even in the USA within the last 50 years, that have had a housing surplus.

Yes, bad places at bad times.

Can you name good ones?

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Defining "good" and "bad" in this context requires lots of other answers first. When NYC had a housing surplus in the late 1970s, many people considered it to be a bad place. But even as they did so, a new generation of artists were moving into it. So was it a bad place at a bad time? Or a good place at a good time? When Seattle had a housing surplus in the late 1970s ("Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" said the billboard in I5), many people considered it to be a bad place. But that was actually the beginning of a slow and steady population growth that now sees it as an incredibly desirable and expensive place to live. Clearly, there are plenty of people for whom both cities were, at those times, "bad". But equally clearly, there are lots of other people for whom the very same places were, to some degree, just what they were looking for. And these effects occur on even smaller scales. The neighborhood in London where I was born was basically a slumlords dream in the 1960s. Tons of empty housing, all very cheap (so cheap that my grandparents could afford a large home there). By the late 80s, it had become incredibly desirable and rather expensive. You can say "it was a bad place at a bad time in the 60s", but a bunch of people considered that an ideal place to be. If we had completely equal distribution of financial resources, this sort of thing might be less of a factor. But as long as there are people looking for "value" and others looking for "luxury", the good/bad distinction doesn't really describe the world very usefully.