You can probably come up with policies that penalize real estate investments, but (a) it will just cause the investors to chase some other asset class, instead of redistributing wealth; (b) unless scarcity is addressed, it's unlikely that housing prices are going to drop. Landlords extract profits from the assets they hold, but they don't cause there to be fewer homes or apartments available.
I've always marveled at how it's 100% accepted to talk about poor people employing six dimensional chess and dubious strategies to scrape undeserved pennies from the system, but it's somehow unthinkable to even so much as contemplate the possibility that rich people are pulling obvious levers to extract millions. The double standard is absolutely wild.
It's one of the few things that are real (ba-dum-tss). And given that demand for housing is inelastic, it'll absolutely absorb any extra money injected into the system as UBI.
Put differently: whatever you set UBI to, it'll always be just barely enough to cover rent on a shack today and not enough tomorrow.
One workable version of UBI was Communism (as implemented in the Soviet Union, not in modern-day China). There you explicitly take the fundamentals like housing out of the economic system and make it a crime to exchange them for money. Prices of staples are tightly controlled, and excess income is to be used for aspirational expenses. It turns out though that it's hard to implement in practice because without a way to regulate demand - the supply side tends to fall over.
what you describe doesn't sound workable to me...
what if UBI led people to think "i can go live wherever i want, regardless of job/market conditions"?
herds of young idealists and artist-types deciding to take over cheap realestate in rust-belt towns and rural areas because they no longer need to be next to a big urban center to 'make it'.
we started to see this during covid WFH, but true UBI would be even bigger
Of course, restricting supply is a problem. I also think this logic might break down in tightly restricted areas that are already vertically built out - Manhattan, for example, because costs per housing unit tend to follow a U curve with respect to height, where they decline with density but start increasing again at very high density, but that's not an issue in most places.
Currently, demand is the only access by which housing markets are dictated in heavily NIMBY areas like SF. Supply is an underused level due to cost and permitting issues.
Greed will take over and try to get the _most_ out of the UBI as if we/you/they owe it to those people.
The idea would be that holding land becomes less profitable, but buying land for development becomes cheaper.
More than 200 million Americans own their home. They are your real estate holders. So what if they absorb some of these increases?
If your concern is housing for those who don't own a home yet then say that, and the solution to that isn't not doing basic income, but to relax the obsolete local zoning laws that require e.g. 1 acre per home in rural area or "nothing higher than 30ft" in suburban areas, basically flat out banning any density increases.
It is super regressive and effectively replaces everything with a housing tax and food tax.
It would be a massive tax break for the rich. IP, stock, and service income would be tax free.
It is primarily popular with a narrow band of white collar technology workers because it would benefit them immensely as their 500k SWE salary become tax free to be picked up by some poor school teacher living next door.
If you use more of your fair share you pay more. If you use less you receive an income.
Instead the ultra wealthy owns the land and receives the income.
Far more ethical than either no tax or taxing productive work.