I mean this in the nicest way possible:
Do you live in California, and/or rent in San Francisco?
Prop 13 ensures that property values -and thus the taxes due on that property- are only reassessed when a property changes hands. If you've held on to a property since Prop 13's passage, your property taxes have not increased in 37 years.
If you're a landlord in San Francisco, the following additional things apply:
You can recover the 100% of the cost of any legally mandated building improvements from your tenants through rent increases.
If you pay for your tenants' utilities, you can recover 100% of utilities cost increases from your tenants.
You can recover either 100% or 50% (depending on the number of units in your building) of capital improvement costs from your tenants.
In the case of increases in Operating and Maintenance expenses, you can permanently increase your tenants' base rent by up to 7%. Small landlords can do this every year. Large landlords can do this once every five years. Unlike the capitol improvements and legally-mandated-improvements recovery mechanisms (which end when the landlord has recovered what he can legally recover), this increase never goes away.
There are even provisions for increasing rents, if they are extraordinarily below "market rate" for extraordinary reasons.
Read this and be enlightened: http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=947
In the five years I've been here, I've only ever a landlord ask for an O&M rent increase once. His petition included a wide variety of line items that even a child could have seen were inapplicable, [0] so his petition was denied. [1]
Landlords who hang on to properties to provide housing see only slow, gradual changes in their operating costs, which can almost always be completely recovered from their tenants. Their property taxes will never go up for as long as they live. Frankly, they have a pretty sweet deal.
[0] The landlord was clearly using an O&M petition to attempt to recover the cost of renovations whose primary purpose were to double the number of "bedrooms" in each newly vacated unit in the building so they could collect 1.5x to 1.75x the rent.
[1] Given that a landlord can trivially recover increases in his O&M costs, why have I never had an O&M-related rent increase in five years? Is it -perhaps- that landlords in the city just don't see significant increases in their O&M expenses?