I know a few landlords and that’s exactly what’s happening. I’m not sure why you find it hard to believe.
When you have a 3 unit building and everyone is paying less than 1/3 the market rate, it’s not worthwhile in the least for a landlord to fix up the building beyond the absolute minimum. Contractor rates have skyrocketed in SF, so even just repainting the building might cost $15k, which might represent several years of profit.
The skyrocketing rates for services are directly tied to the skyrocketing rent increases. The cost of performing these services does not change substantially from city to city, or else landlords renting to people in cities with more reasonably priced units would not be able to repair them. The big difference is the cost of living for the contractors, which gets passed to the people paying for repairs--and by far the largest component of cost of living in SF is rent. Like I said in the other comment, this is a largely self-imposed problem.
Not sure how big an impact that is. There aren't many contractors moving into the area like tech workers. Most of them are locals who have lived here for decades, so either have a rent controlled place or bought a home when prices were more reasonable.
Yup, our three floor building was 40k to repaint and fix a few custom windows (with plastic instead of custom wrapped glass) . Hadn’t been painted in over 20 years though.
When you have a 3 unit building and everyone is paying less than 1/3 the market rate, it’s not worthwhile in the least for a landlord to fix up the building beyond the absolute minimum. Contractor rates have skyrocketed in SF, so even just repainting the building might cost $15k, which might represent several years of profit.