Those seem incompatible to me.
(UBI means Universal Basic Income, giving everyone a basic income, for free)
Except that landlords are coming together to set prices so that they can all set them high. I don’t remember what the group is called, but someone was discussing it a while back. Doesn’t have to be a monopoly if they’re conspiring, which is what is happening with so many consumer goods and services.
Cartel is the word you are probably looking for. Cartels are when an association of different suppliers collude to restrict competition and keep prices high.
it’s only really a cartel if they get together and make these plans, in reality none of these landlords are stupid, they will just adjust their demands to the upper region of what people feel acceptable, this slowly moves the “acceptability window” up, all without anyone needing to conspire with anyone else
I’ve seen that stuff but it’s too much to assume that this kind of coordination is the controlling factor in housing prices, or most other prices. You do need a monopoly because there’s too much incentive for defecting from the conspiracy if the fixed price is too far away from what the market price would be. I think housing is expensive mainly because of supply being suppressed and wealth inequality, and UBI would begin to address the latter.
the use of this software prevented landlords from courting would-be renters through the use of different discounts, said the lawsuit. For instance, landlords sometimes offer move-in deals or compete on prices but the use of Yardi’s algorithmic pricing tool disrupted that practice, claimed the attorneys …
Overall, the rate of rent growth has fallen back toward historical norms after nearly two years of historically high growth.
Like I mentioned in another comment, I can see how this kind of thing could make some difference in pricing by avoiding giving renters deals that wouldn’t have actually been necessary to secure a lease. That’s very far from being evidence that supply and demand doesn’t even apply and the market price is dictated by fiat, which is an absurd conspiracy theory that doesn’t follow at all from any of the articles being linked.
How do you explain cereal being $8 a box, when it was $5 pre-COVID or the million other products that now cost more? There are recordings of board meetings that were leaked of board members admitting that they inflated prices or unnecessarily kept prices inflated because they knew people would pay it.
Why could that not have an explanation that is primarily about economic forces? They printed a ton of money around when Covid happened, and the distribution of wealth shifted significantly. I can buy that businesses could be eking out a little more efficiency by coordinating, but not that we are in a secret command economy and economics is basically all fake.
How do you explain cereal being $8 a box, when it was $5 pre-COVID …
Two things:
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We shut down the economy, and supply got disrupted because the economy isn’t a thing you can just turn off for a period of time and have it come back on again
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We shut down the economy in non-equal fashion leading to some stores being forced to close while others were allowed to remain open. This led to reduced competition among those supplying the cereal. Competition works to reduce prices, and we killed the competition. The covid lockdowns were a government-enforced consolidation of the market. There are fewer players, each of which owns a larger share now.
