Living in an expensive area is a consumption choice.

If I live in a mansion in that Grover, NC, would you say that my expenses were high so I deserve more basic income?

High prices are the market telling you to consider looking someplace else to live.

This is how the good ideas of progressive intellectuals get destroyed: other progressives want to weigh them down with all sorts of other social engineering baggage. (Conservative intellectuals have good ideas that get destroyed by other conservatives, too.)