There may be other factors besides what they nominally "want". Depending on their source of financing, landlords changing the rent on these spaces can be both logistically difficult and may cause a huge negative cashflow shock because of the way it effects capital requirements on commercial loans. Louis Rossmann covers it in a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfmMB1E_qk) based on this reddit comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/nyc/comments/innhah/nearly_twothird...).