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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

You’re articulating clearly why even solving all underlying causes of homelessness wouldn’t actually cure homelessness. Why don’t you believe your own argument?

In any case, while that is the obvious conclusion (as you’ve stated), I never took the position that we merely need to fix mental health etc. I am not saying UBI will work but will make prices go up so I don’t like it.

I am saying that UBI won’t work, it will in fact make inequality worse, AND there’s a solution that will work. It’s the LVT. Once we have LVT, then we could do UBI and the upside would not get absorbed by landlords.

It’s odd to me that you’re claiming that I’m being dismissive of poor folks but you’re literally advocating moving to an igloo in Alaska as a solution?

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I apologize if using hyperboles makes my point less clear. I'm not literally advocating Alaska, I'm trying to make the point that cities as we currently know them only exist because they are the most efficient solution when the population mostly has to work in the same location. Once you remove this constraint, it's much more viable to have smaller and more distributed population centers, without necessarily resorting to living alone in Alaska. This would still significantly reduce rents, and even better allows competition between distant locations which wouldn't otherwise be competing on prices.

For the other point, UBI as I know it must be financed by some sort of increased taxation of the rich, it is not the government blindly printing money and distributing it. I don't know whether that taxation should be LVT or something else, I'm simply talking about why the argument that UBI doesn't work due to rent is, in my opinion, incorrect.

If we accept that a feature of cities is people want to live in them, and will compete for that, therefore UBI won't help people live in cities.

How does LVT help poorer people live in cities? The competition for clustered housing continues, that's a fundamental cause.

Richer people still have an advantage over poorer people in economic competition. Instead of people renting and landlords scooping up all the UBI, with LVT you have people competing to buy housing and LVT scooping up all that people can obtain (whether it's UBI, earnings or something else).

Poorer people don't have much luck buying housing in the first place, because of mortgage gatekeeping, even when the actual cost of purchase (mortgage payments) is significantly lower then renting. Even when they do, they pay more for the same level of housing in the end (mortgage interest).

So a switch to a city economy where housing is primarily based around purchases would seem to be not so good for poorer people trying to live there, unless something can be done about access to long-term credit.

LVT would help in a few ways:

1) Public investments such as subways yield increases to public coffers (today, the landlords who happen to own land near a new subway station get a windfall off the city’s billions of dollars of investment). This would incentivize public investment.

2) Land speculation goes away, and development is strongly incentivized, so more units come online and push prices down.

3) Both of the above improvements, as well as private investments made due to public/communal value (such as HQ2 not being built in the middle of nowhere), would funnel huge amounts of money to public coffers. We as a democratic society can decide if we want service workers living in our cities (I reckon anyone who lives in reality does want this) and have the resources to fund making that possible. Things like functioning transit systems go a long, long way.

Land tax is a better then income tax, because it is more efficient. UBI is better then 100 different need based programs because it is more efficient. But government/politicians do not value efficiency, they value bureaucracy. So they will stand in the way of anything better. Clearly what we need is a UBG, Universal Bureaucrat Guillotine.

> If we accept that a feature of cities is people want to live in them, and will compete for that, therefore UBI won't help people live in cities.

It depends on why people want to live in cities. The people who are living in cities mostly for the vibrant community will probably want to stay there. The people who are living in cities because they can't get a job outside the city will no longer have that constraint, and some of those people will move away. Not everyone has to move away for competition to decrease.

> How does LVT help poorer people live in cities? The competition for clustered housing continues, that's a fundamental cause.

It means there are better incentives to build denser housing (redeveloping doesn't increase your property taxes, but as your area gets more desirable your land value tax goes up whether you redevelop or not) and public transit (because the city can fund it off the land value increases). So there's a bigger supply of clustered housing.

> Poorer people don't have much luck buying housing in the first place, because of mortgage gatekeeping, even when the actual cost of purchase (mortgage payments) is significantly lower then renting. Even when they do, they pay more for the same level of housing in the end (mortgage interest).

LVT helps a lot with that as well: property becomes less good as an investment, and you don't get to pay lower property taxes just because your bought a while ago.

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