Wouldn't that only work if the other town didn't also have UBI? I think the conjecture is that if everyone, everywhere is suddenly guaranteed to have a certain minimum amount of money per month then landlords everywhere are going to raise rents. Who are the landlords that are just going to leave money sitting on the table at a cost to themselves? The only thing that could counter this reliably would be an increase in housing supply.

I actually think that would be a better solution than UBI, figure out what American public housing has done wrong (namely the idiotic towers in a park idea) and fix it, say by producing lower density functional neighbourhoods that have proper streets, places for business, community services, etc. and just build masses of them. Housing is the biggest cost after all and it's a large public works project that could be carried out everywhere. You'd have to fix the problem of corruption in projects of that nature though and that's unfortunately a much bigger challenge.

There was an article on here a while ago about a successful undertaking in Greece to build massive amounts of new housing without major public investment, maybe just do that? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-desig...